Anthropic President Daniela Amodei Created A Stuffed-Animal Advisory Council While At OpenAI

Before Anthropic existed, Daniela Amodei reportedly developed an unconventional method for sorting through difficult decisions at work: she and her husband created an imaginary group of advisers using plush toys, according to the NY Post.

The couple gave each toy a distinct temperament and point of view, then used those characters to consider how different kinds of managers might respond to the same problem, according to an account in The Atlantic drawn from journalist Kevin Roose’s forthcoming book, The AGI Chronicles.

The Post writes that one character, Jinji, was a laid-back cat whose instinct was to lighten Amodei’s workload and skip unnecessary meetings. A pink bear called Maura represented the opposite approach — organized, demanding and focused on details. Another, Beary Bonds, was a panda meant to bring compassion and generosity into the discussion.

Despite the playful setup, Amodei apparently found practical value in the exercise. She told Roose in 2023 that it was “very useful in analyzing different personality types.”

The practice was largely unknown inside OpenAI, where Amodei had been working since 2018. It also came during an increasingly difficult period for her and her brother Dario Amodei at the company.

Daniela had moved into management of technical teams and developed disagreements with several senior OpenAI figures, including Greg Brockman and Mira Murati. Her relationship with Brockman had previously been much warmer — he had even spoken at her wedding to Holden Karnofsky in 2017 — but their working relationship deteriorated over time.

Dario, meanwhile, had his own concerns about OpenAI’s leadership and the direction of its AI development. He became particularly wary of Sam Altman and Brockman and began organizing with researchers who wanted greater emphasis placed on the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems.

That faction communicated privately and held meetings outside the company’s usual structure. Some colleagues reportedly referred to it as “Dario’s clique.”

Eventually, the internal disagreements turned into plans for an entirely new company. In 2020, Dario began assembling a team willing to leave OpenAI and pursue advanced AI research under a different safety philosophy.

Daniela became a central figure in that departure, including negotiating with OpenAI as the group prepared to leave. Those involved reportedly referred to the split privately as “the divorce.”

The Amodeis exited OpenAI in December 2020 and helped establish Anthropic with Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown, Chris Olah and Jared Kaplan. Ben Mann was subsequently recognized as another co-founder.

What began with ambitions of building a comparatively small research operation eventually became something much larger. Anthropic expanded to thousands of workers and developed into one of OpenAI’s most significant competitors.

Daniela today serves as Anthropic’s president and board chair, with authority extending across much of the company’s research, engineering, product and business operations. Karnofsky, who once sat on OpenAI’s nonprofit board, also eventually joined Anthropic.

The revelation about Amodei’s plush management advisers arrives as Anthropic has transformed from a small AI-safety startup into one of the industry’s most valuable companies, with reports suggesting a potential IPO could eventually carry a valuation approaching $2 trillion.