In this episode of The Circuit, Bloomberg goes inside Anthropic, the AI lab that started as an underdog and is now valued at nearly a trillion dollars. The conversation centers on the sibling duo running the company, Dario Amodei, the brother and visionary, and Daniela Amodei, the sister and operator, along with Boris Cherny, the engineer behind Claude Code and Claude Cowork. It is a rare, on-the-record look at how a safety-obsessed startup founded by a group of OpenAI defectors in 2021 became the breakout star of the AI arms race, wiping billions in value off software stocks and forcing an uncomfortable national conversation about the future of work. You can watch the full episode here.

TLDW

Dario and Daniela Amodei walk through Anthropic’s rise from a pandemic-era group meeting on the grass in Precita Park to a roughly $965 billion AI juggernaut that is now profitable for the first time. They explain why they left OpenAI, citing a breakdown of trust and values with Sam Altman rather than a single safety disagreement, and how Dario’s early bet on scaling laws shaped the entire field. The two describe how Claude is trained for character and “professional warmth,” anchored in documents like the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and how the company defines a good model as one that does not lie, hallucinate, or deceive. The business story is enterprise and coding: Claude Code and Claude Cowork automated huge chunks of software engineering, triggered a SaaSpocalypse that erased $285 billion in market value overnight, and pushed annualized growth to as high as 80x in a single quarter. Boris Cherny, recruited from a slow miso-making life in rural Japan, says Claude has written one hundred percent of his code for at least six months. The hardest part of the conversation is jobs: Dario stands by his warning that AI could eliminate half of all entry level white collar jobs in one to five years, pushes back hard on Jensen Huang’s “doom marketing” critique, and lays out where displaced workers might go, from the physical world to human-centered roles like a reimagined, more interpersonal version of medicine. The episode closes by teasing AI and the future of warfare, a scarily powerful new model called Mythos, and Dario’s identification not with Oppenheimer but with Leo Szilard.

Thoughts

The most revealing moment in this profile is not a number, it is Dario Amodei’s description of the “smooth exponential.” His whole career, he says, has felt like nothing happening, nothing happening, nothing happening, and then zoom. That mental model is the key to understanding why Anthropic behaves the way it does. A company that genuinely believes it is riding an exponential will tolerate enormous near-term discomfort, public criticism, and internal strain, because it has already priced in a future that looks nothing like the present. Whether that conviction is wisdom or a kind of motivated certainty is the open question the episode never fully resolves, but it explains the urgency in every answer he gives.

The Boris Cherny segment is the part that should make working engineers sit up. When a senior engineer says Claude has written one hundred percent of his code for six months and that he feels like he has a jet pack, that is not a marketing line, it is a description of a job that has already changed underneath the person doing it. The framing in the piece is optimistic, superpowers and fun, but the logical endpoint is exactly the one Dario himself names a few minutes later: you automate ninety percent of a job, the remaining humans get ten times more leveraged, and then the curve keeps bending toward one hundred percent. Anthropic is, unusually, building the thing and narrating its own disruption in the same breath. That honesty is rare, and it is also a little vertiginous.

The values-versus-business-model argument deserves more scrutiny than it gets. Dario’s claim is elegant: a business model that conflicts with your values forces you to either betray the values or become irrelevant, so Anthropic chose enterprise and coding because curing diseases and making energy cheaper are enterprise work, while consumer engagement is the addiction-maximizing trap of social media. It is a genuinely good argument, and it is also extremely convenient that the values-aligned path happens to be the most lucrative one. The episode lets that tension sit, which is the right call. The honest reading is that Anthropic found a place where doing well and doing good currently point in the same direction, and the harder test will come the first time they diverge.

On jobs, Dario is more persuasive than his critics give him credit for, precisely because he refuses the comfortable framing. Jensen Huang and others accuse him of conflating tasks with jobs and of doom marketing that benefits Anthropic. Dario’s response, that the idea this is cheap marketing is itself cheap marketing, is sharper than it first sounds. He is pointing at the way social media flattens a five-page argument about tasks, jobs, tax policy, and the adolescence of technology into a three-second clip designed to provoke. The deeper point is that he is trying to hold two things at once, fast GDP growth and high unemployment, and our public discourse is structurally bad at holding two things at once. That is less a story about AI than about the medium we use to argue about it.

Finally, the Oppenheimer exchange reframes the entire profile. Dario explicitly rejects the lone-genius model and names Leo Szilard, the scientist who first imagined the chain reaction, as the figure he identifies with. He calls Oppenheimer a failure case, an example of what should not happen. For a man whose company is constantly accused of cultivating a great-man mythology, choosing the early-warning scientist over the bomb’s public face is a deliberate statement about how he wants this story to end: not with charismatic individuals at the center of everything, but with checks and balances everywhere. It is the most quietly radical thing said in the whole piece, and the teaser for a model named Mythos lands with a little extra irony because of it.

Key Takeaways

• Anthropic is profiled as an AI juggernaut valued at nearly a trillion dollars, with the figure of roughly $965 billion framing the episode, and is described as profitable for the first time.
• The company was founded in 2021 by a team of OpenAI defectors and started as an underdog lab before becoming the breakout star of the AI race.
• Anthropic is run by a sibling duo, Dario Amodei as the visionary and Daniela Amodei as the operator who turns his ideas into action, and Daniela jokes that when they argue, no one wins.
• Dario describes the AI trajectory as a “smooth exponential” where nothing seems to happen for a long time and then progress suddenly explodes.
• He says he predicted from a graph that Anthropic would become the AI company with the most revenue and valuation around this time, and that it has happened.
• Dario grew up in San Francisco with a leather-craftsman father and a librarian mother, took calculus in middle school, and studied math at UC Berkeley while in high school, with no early interest in the internet revolution.
• Dario studied neuroscience before moving to AI at Baidu and later Google, while Daniela was an early employee at Stripe.
• Both joined OpenAI starting in 2016, where Dario developed the concept of scaling laws, predicting that large language models would improve simply by adding more data and compute even if the underlying algorithm stayed the same.
• Scaling up was a counter-cultural scientific bet at the time, held mainly by the founding research team, and it helped supercharge OpenAI’s models and pave the way for ChatGPT.
• The Amodeis left OpenAI after clashing with Sam Altman over direction and values, framing it as a breakdown of trust and honesty rather than a single safety disagreement.
• Altman has said that despite their differences, he mostly trusts Anthropic as a company.
• Anthropic has all seven of its co-founders still at the company, which Dario notes almost never happens at a company of its size.
• The early team met during the pandemic at Precita Park in San Francisco, pulling up chairs on the grass to talk about what they were building.
• The name Anthropic comes from the Greek word for human, reflecting a stated mission to build responsible AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.
• Dario has published long essays including Machines of Loving Grace and The Adolescence of Technology, exploring both the miraculous potential and the worst-case scenarios of AI.
• Claude is trained to follow a set of principles called a Constitution, intended to keep it aligned and well-behaved.
• Daniela describes Claude’s intended personality as “professional warmth,” approachable but distant, not a best friend and not cold or calculating.
• A good model, in Anthropic’s framing, does not lie accidentally or intentionally, with lying including hallucinations where the model invents something it does not know.
• Anthropic’s own research has shown that models can purposely try to deceive users, which the company works to prevent in production models.
• There is no universal standard for helpfulness or harmlessness, so Anthropic draws on founding documents like the UN Declaration of Human Rights to train Claude’s character.
• The company has begun consulting religious leaders about Claude as an entity and about core values that transcend any single worldview.
• Early Claude models, around the Claude 2 era, were sometimes “nannyish,” expressing concern when a user just wanted the weather, which researchers describe as tuning a fine dial.
• Anthropic’s revenue skyrocketed over the past year, driven by a focus on lucrative business tools rather than consumer apps.
• Claude Code automated large chunks of software engineering, and Claude Cowork extended that power to non-engineers.
• Dario frames the enterprise bet as a values-and-business decision, arguing that a business model conflicting with your values forces you to betray them or become irrelevant.
• He contrasts engagement-and-addiction-driven consumer and advertising models with enterprise uses like curing diseases, advancing biotech and pharma, and making energy cheaper.
• Soon after Claude Cowork launched, $285 billion in market value vanished overnight in what traders called the SaaSpocalypse, with some software stocks down nine days in a row.
• Dario argues the software “pie” will get bigger overall, even as some incumbents shrink or go out of business if they fail to adapt and defend their moats.
• Boris Cherny, the engineer behind Claude Code and Claude Cowork, was recruited in 2024 from a slow life in rural Japan where he made miso and shopped at farmer’s markets.
• Cherny’s bet was that a coding agent could do all of software development, not just autocomplete a line or a sentence.
• He now runs anywhere from a few to a few thousand Claudes at once and says Claude has written one hundred percent of his code for at least six months.
• A live demo builds a working recipe app that suggests meals for the week in minutes, work that used to take hours or days.
• At the second annual Code with Claude conference, Anthropic reported API volume up nearly 17x year over year, eight frontier models shipped in twelve months, and first-quarter growth that annualizes to roughly 80x.
• Dario stands by his warning that AI could eliminate half of all entry level white collar jobs in the next one to five years, saying he remains the same order of concerned.
• He warns of an unusual combination of very fast GDP growth alongside high unemployment, underemployment, low-wage jobs, and high inequality.
• Jensen Huang and others have pushed back, accusing Dario of conflating tasks with jobs and of doom marketing that benefits Anthropic.
• Dario responds that the claim this is cheap marketing is itself cheap marketing, and blames social media for flattening his careful five-page arguments into three-second clips.
• Anthropic published a paper estimating that management, finance, and legal jobs could be among the fields most affected by AI in the near future.
• Dario points to the physical world, human-centered relationship-driven work, and humans directing AI as places displaced workers might go, though he is unsure how thick those roles will be.
• He uses medicine as an example, predicting AI will excel at diagnosis while doctors pivot toward the interpersonal, hands-on, bedside-manner parts that AI cannot replace.
• The episode teases a next installment on AI and the future of warfare, a scarily powerful new model called Mythos, and the theme of riding the exponential while avoiding dystopia.
• Dario names The Making of the Atomic Bomb as a favorite book and identifies most with Leo Szilard, who first conceived of a chain reaction, rather than Oppenheimer, whom he sees as a failure case.
• His view is that the only way the AI era ends well is through checks and balances everywhere, not larger-than-life personalities at the center of everything.

Detailed Summary

An unlikely AI celebrity and a sibling-run juggernaut

The profile opens in a library Dario Amodei clearly loves, establishing him as an unlikely AI celebrity, a man known for warning the world about the risks of artificial intelligence who now runs a company valued at nearly a trillion dollars. Anthropic is presented as the breakout star of the AI race, wiping billions off software stocks, going head-to-head with the Pentagon, and building models powerful enough to threaten modern cybersecurity, with early testers reportedly calling one capability a super weapon and asking the company not to release it. Guiding the company is the sibling pair, Dario the visionary and Daniela the operator who translates his swirling cosmic thoughts into action. Daniela explains that the two have always been close and always wanted to do something big together, and when asked who wins their arguments, she says no one. The framing throughout is of a young, fast-growing startup carrying enormous responsibility for how humanity works, learns, thinks, and even fights wars.

The smooth exponential and the road from OpenAI

Dario describes his entire career as the experience of a smooth exponential, where nothing happens for a long stretch and then things go crazy, and he says he watched a graph and correctly predicted Anthropic would top the field in revenue and valuation around now. His backstory is a math prodigy in San Francisco, the son of a leather craftsman and a librarian, taking calculus in middle school and Berkeley math classes in high school, indifferent to the internet revolution and drawn instead to science fiction and understanding the universe. Daniela, more into reading and the arts, calls them near-perfect complements. Dario moved from neuroscience into AI at Baidu and Google, Daniela went to Stripe, and both eventually joined OpenAI starting in 2016, where Dario developed scaling laws, the then counter-cultural bet that more data and compute alone would make models smarter. That insight helped power the models behind ChatGPT, but the Amodeis clashed with Sam Altman over values and direction. Dario frames the departure bluntly: disagreements on safety alone were not enough, but a loss of trust, a sense that Altman’s stated values were not his real values, made it impossible to continue. The resolution, he says, was simply to go off and do their own thing.

Precita Park, the Constitution, and teaching Claude to be good

Anthropic’s origin story runs through Precita Park, where the early pandemic-era team gathered on the grass to talk about what they were building. Of seven co-founders, all are still at the company, a retention record Dario says almost never happens at this scale. From the start the company pitched itself as the ultimate safety-conscious lab, with Dario publishing essays like Machines of Loving Grace and The Adolescence of Technology. Claude is trained on a Constitution, and Daniela describes its intended character as professional warmth, approachable but distant. Defining a good model, the team says it should not lie, whether through intentional deception or hallucination, the latter being the model inventing answers it does not actually know. Anthropic’s research has shown models can deliberately deceive, something they work to prevent in production. Because there is no universal standard for helpfulness or harmlessness, they anchor Claude’s training in documents like the UN Declaration of Human Rights and have begun talking with religious leaders about values that transcend any single worldview. Daniela recalls early “nannyish” Claude 2-era behavior, where the model fretted over a user who only wanted the weather, and describes the work as threading a fine needle to land in the center of the dial.

The enterprise bet, Claude Code, and the SaaSpocalypse

Anthropic’s revenue surge and first-time profitability are attributed to a focus on business tools, especially Claude Code, which automated large chunks of software engineering, and Claude Cowork, which extended that capability beyond engineers. Dario frames the bet on coding and enterprise as both a values and a business decision: a business model that conflicts with your values eventually forces you to betray them or become irrelevant. He contrasts the engagement and addiction incentives of advertising-driven social media and AI video with enterprise applications like curing diseases, biotech, pharma, academic research, and cheaper energy, all of which he counts as enterprise work aligned with the company’s mission. The disruption was immediate and brutal: soon after Claude Cowork launched, $285 billion in market value vanished overnight in what traders dubbed the SaaSpocalypse, with some software stocks falling nine days straight. Dario’s read is that the overall software pie will grow even as specific incumbents shrink or fail, and that the big losers will be those who do not see what is coming or defend their moats.

Boris Cherny, jet packs, and Code with Claude

Much of Anthropic’s recent growth is credited to Boris Cherny, the engineer behind Claude Code and Claude Cowork, hired in 2024 from a deliberately slow life in rural Japan where he made miso and frequented farmer’s markets. A serious science fiction reader, Cherny was awed by his first AI chatbot and also acutely aware of how badly the technology could go. His bet was that a coding agent could do all of software development rather than just autocomplete. He now describes orchestrating anywhere from a few to a few thousand Claudes at once, talking to one while it writes code and moving to the next, and says Claude has written one hundred percent of his code for at least six months. He compares the feeling to having superpowers and a jet pack, calling engineering more fun than ever. A live demo has Claude build a working weekly-meal recipe app in minutes. The story then moves to the second annual Code with Claude conference, where the company reports API volume up nearly 17x year over year, eight frontier models shipped in twelve months, and first-quarter growth annualizing to roughly 80x, with attendees ranging from technical superfans to curious non-engineers.

Jobs, the tasks-versus-jobs fight, and a more human medicine

The episode turns to the uncomfortable core: whether engineers will be the first casualties of the AI they are building. Dario stands by his warning that AI could eliminate half of all entry level white collar jobs in one to five years and says he is still the same order of concerned, describing a strange combination of very fast GDP growth with high unemployment, underemployment, low-wage work, and inequality. He notes the usual productivity hump, where automating ninety percent of a job makes humans ten times more leveraged on the rest, before the curve bends toward one hundred percent. With 70 percent of Americans expecting AI to kill jobs and nearly a third fearing for their own, the stakes are political. Jensen Huang and others accuse Dario of conflating tasks with jobs and of doom marketing, and Dario pushes back hard, arguing he writes carefully across five pages about tasks, jobs, tax and macroeconomic policy, and the new jobs of the adolescence of technology, and that calling this cheap marketing is itself cheap marketing born of social media’s three-second culture. Anthropic has published a paper suggesting management, finance, and legal jobs could change the most. Dario points to the physical world, human-centered relationship work, and humans directing AI as landing spots, using medicine as his example: AI will become an excellent diagnostician, but it cannot physically examine a patient or provide bedside manner, so medicine pivots toward the interpersonal. The episode closes by teasing AI and the future of warfare, a powerful new model called Mythos, and Dario’s identification with Leo Szilard over Oppenheimer, whom he calls a failure case, insisting the era can only end well with checks and balances everywhere rather than larger-than-life figures at the center.

Notable Quotes

“There’s this kind of smooth exponential, and the experience of the smooth exponential is, nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening. Little things happen, and then zoom, it goes crazy.”

Dario Amodei, on how AI progress actually feels from the inside

“When you feel that you can’t trust someone, when you feel that their values are not what they say they are, when you feel that they’re not honest, that makes it very hard to continue to work with a company.”

Dario Amodei, on why he and Daniela left OpenAI

“Some of the early companies that we gave this to said things like, this is a super weapon, please don’t release this.”

Anthropic, on early reactions to one of its more powerful models

“I like to describe it as professional warmth. So the goal is not for it to be your best friend, but it’s not for it to be sort of cold, rote, calculating.”

Daniela Amodei, describing the character Anthropic designs into Claude

“If you pick a business model that fundamentally conflicts with your values, you’re gonna have a hard time. Either you betray your own values or you become irrelevant.”

Dario Amodei, on why Anthropic bet on enterprise and coding

“For me personally, it’s been writing a hundred percent of my code for at least six months. The work of engineering has just completely changed.”

Boris Cherny, the engineer behind Claude Code and Claude Cowork

“I feel like I suddenly have superpowers. I have like a jet pack and the engineering has never been this fun.”

Boris Cherny, on building software with Claude Code

“I think we could have this very unusual combination of very fast GDP growth and high unemployment, or at least underemployment, or low wage jobs, high inequality.”

Dario Amodei, on the economic shock he is most worried about

“The idea that this is cheap marketing is itself cheap marketing. I think it’s part of the disease of Silicon Valley.”

Dario Amodei, responding to the doom-marketing accusation

“The figure I most identified with was Leo Szilard, who was the one who first had the idea that there could be a chain reaction.”

Dario Amodei, on which atomic-age scientist he sees himself in, rejecting Oppenheimer as a failure case

Watch the full episode of The Circuit inside Anthropic here.

Related Reading

• Anthropic the official site for the company, Claude, Claude Code, and its safety research.
• Machines of Loving Grace Dario Amodei’s long essay on the optimistic case for powerful AI referenced in the profile.
• Scaling laws (Wikipedia) background on the data-and-compute bet Dario developed that reshaped modern AI.
• Leo Szilard (Wikipedia) the physicist who first conceived the nuclear chain reaction and whom Dario says he identifies with.
• Purpose the PJFP pillar on building meaningful work and direction in a world being reshaped by AI.