Anthropic Hired President Daniela Amodei's Husband to Work on AI Safety Strategy

Tech AI Anthropic hired president Daniela Amodei’s husband to work on the company’s AI safety strategy

 By Jessica Mathews Jessica Mathews and Sharon Goldman Sharon Goldman Down Arrow Button Icon By Jessica Mathews Jessica Mathews and Sharon Goldman Sharon Goldman Down Arrow Button Icon February 13, 2025, 4:11 PM ET Add us on Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic Anthropic, the fast-growing AI company currently valued at $60 billion, has quietly hired the husband of cofounder and president Daniela Amodei to help craft safety strategy, adding another family connection to the startup helmed by brother and sister Daniela and CEO Dario Amodei .

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 Holden Karnofksy, Daniela Amodei’s husband, joined Anthropic last month as a member of the startup’s “technical staff,” a company spokesperson confirmed. The company had not announced Karnofsky’s hiring, but Karnofsky recently updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect his new position. 

 Karnofsky is an AI safety researcher and philanthropist closely associated with Effective Altruism, a philanthropical movement whose focuses include AI’s existential risks, and which has garnered both influence and controversy in recent years. Karnofsky also once served on OpenAI’s board.

Karnofsky is working on Anthropic’s “Responsible Scaling Policy,” which is the company’s set of protocols to manage public and societal risk around powerful AI models, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter and confirmed by Anthropic. Both sources, whose identity is known to Fortune , were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss company matters.

 

 Anthropic confirmed that  Karnofsky is working on trust and safety issues, describing his title only as “a member of the technical staff” reporting to Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan. 

 “He is working on the responsible scaling policy and other aspects around safety planning ahead of highly advanced AI systems,” the spokesperson said.

 With Karnofsky’s addition to the company, Anthropic now has three close family members holding influential roles at the company. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei were part of a group of early OpenAI employees who left the company in late 2020 to found Anthropic, in part because they were concerned that OpenAI under the leadership of CEO Sam Altman was becoming too focused on commercial products while deemphasizing AI safety research . 

 Anthropic also recently hired Niki Parmar, the sole female member of the Google AI research team that in 2017 developed the Transformer, a kind of neural network design on which all of today’s generative AI models are based.  

 

 Parmar had previously cofounded Adept AI, a startup working on AI agents for work, but left before a majority of that company’s team was hired by Amazon last year. She went on to cofound another AI startup, Essential AI, with Ashish Vaswani, who was one of her coauthors on the landmark Transformer research. Vaswani i

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