Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the most important thing he does each day has nothing to do with training AI models or shipping products. Instead, he spends almost half his time working on company culture, he said.
“I probably spend a third, maybe 40%, of my time making sure the culture of Anthropic is good,” Amodei said in an interview on the Dwarkesh Podcast in February.
Amodei’s comments offer a rare window into how one of tech’s most closely watched CEOs manages a company that now sports 2,500 employees and this week confidentially filed for an IPO after raising $65 billion in a recent funding round that valued it at $965 billion.
As Anthropic has expanded, it has become nearly impossible for Amodei to weigh in on every technical and product decision, he said. So rather than dig into the finer details, he has tried to focus on the bigger picture: making sure his employees like working for Anthropic; that the company’s mission and values are clear; and that all workers are working toward the same mission instead of against one another, as he said happens at other unnamed AI companies.
“I think we’ve done an extraordinarily good job, even if not perfect, of holding the company together, making everyone feel the mission, that we’re sincere about the mission, and that everyone has faith that everyone else there is working for the right reason,” he said.
