PERSON

Dario Amodei

The Princeton-trained biophysicist who left OpenAI to found Anthropic on the conviction that the most important question in AI was not how to make systems more powerful but how to make them safe at the same pace as they became powerful.

Dario Amodei is the builder who held the tension. Born in 1983 in San Francisco, trained in physics at Stanford and biophysics at Princeton, he came to artificial intelligence by way of neuroscience—studying the electrophysiology of neural circuits, the literal wiring of biological intelligence—and brought with him a physicist's understanding of phase transitions, the moments when a system's behavior changes qualitatively rather than quantitatively, when water becomes ice or iron becomes magnetic. He saw AI development through this lens: the progression from one model generation to the next was not a smooth, linear advance in capability but a series of phase transitions, each producing behaviors that the previous generation had not exhibited and that the builders had not fully anticipated. This was the specific feature that distinguished AI from every previous powerful technology: for the first time, the builders of a powerful technology could not fully explain what their creation was doing or why. The

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