Meet the seven co-founders of Anthropic

Four researchers, a former journalist, a public policymaker, and an engineer founded Anthropic in 2021. Six years later, the artificial intelligence company is about to go public, with trading expected to begin on Nov. 19, in what will be one of the biggest IPOs on record.

Those seven co-founders are poised to each be worth many billions of dollars.

It all started with a defection.

At the end of 2020, siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei were vice presidents at OpenAI, the company that kicked off the generative AI frenzy with the launch of ChatGPT. But the two had grown frustrated with their employer over its approach to AI safety. Fearing a world where AI models' capabilities would progress faster than our understanding of them, the duo launched Anthropic early the next year.

They took a handful of OpenAI colleagues with them: Tom Brown, the company's research engineering lead on GPT-3; Jack Clark, a policy director; Jared Kaplan, a contract research consultant; and Sam McCandlish and Chris Olah, both members of OpenAI's technical staff.

They were all deeply concerned about OpenAI's ambitions to focus on commercialization, and they now stand to be some of the first to cash in on the AI boom.

"They really started Anthropic not because they were hoping to get rich, but they started Anthropic because they like wanted to shape this really important thing in the world, and they thought that other people might do it worse than them," said Jeffrey Ladish, who joined Anthropic as a contract safety engineer in September 2021, and now serves as the executive director of AI safety institute Palisade Research.

Collectively the co-founders own about 10% of Anthropic. Each has about 240,000,000 class A shares, or about a 1.4% stake.

"It's extremely hard not to be influenced by your incentives," Ladish said. "You have investors, and money is not just like an end; it's also a means."

Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.