New York (AFP) – The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the heated debate around its risks have made Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, the most high-profile boss of the moment, even if the forty-year-old remains an enigma.

Published on: 02/10/2026 - 09:40

“He is one of the great legends of tech and business,” already proclaims Alex Karp, the whimsical boss of the AI ​​company Palantir, about Dario Amodei.

Aged 43, the San Francisco native has built, in just five years, a company that could be valued at $2,000 billion for its IPO, scheduled for this fall.

“He is probably one of the most visible bosses, with Sam Altman, and, on the traditional economic side, Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase) or Bernard Arnault (LVMH),” says Stephen Henriques, researcher at Yale University.

Rebellious hair, round glasses, debonair appearance, taste for V-shaped sweaters, Dario Amodei is nevertheless light years away from the archetype of the big boss, visibly driven by a different mechanism than his peers.

He fascinates as much as he irritates the barons of investment capital or Donald Trump and his entourage, who struggle to decode how it works and are annoyed by his comments considered alarmist on the dangers of AI for humanity.

They still have not understood how, in March, he was able to go into confrontation with the American government to prevent certain security and military uses of his AI, even if it meant risking losing everything.

Some see him as a humanist, fundamentally concerned about the effects of AI on society, others as a skillful tactician, ready to play on the collective fears of this technology to serve Anthropic.

"Idealistic"

“He was idealistic,” recalls Michael Berry, who was his thesis advisor at Princeton University in the late 2000s.

“He wanted to tackle big problems,” he explains, about this student who switched from physics to biology for his doctorate, “to acquire knowledge and tools (...) which could have allowed him to treat diseases”.

But here again, the picture is mixed.

“I have never seen someone who was on a strong moral or ethical quest,” says Olivier Marre, who collaborated with Dario Amodei at Princeton on a retinal analysis device.

“Dario was someone ambitious, with the desire to succeed and be recognized (...) but not excessively or abnormally,” says the man who is now research director at INSERM.

After Princeton, this swimming enthusiast moved on to a postdoc at Stanford devoted to protein analysis, while AI was making major advances.

“The decisive moment comes when he becomes interested in both AI and Effective Altruism,” describes a witness on condition of anonymity. “Before that,” he says, “he might as well have gone into things that were less original or at least less in the spotlight.”

Dario Amodei is considered one of the figures of the so-called effective altruism (EA) and rationalism movements, which aim in particular to reduce the risks of artificial intelligence.

Anthropic, however, reminds AFP that it has distanced itself from the EA and affirmed that the company was not guided by a movement or an ideology.

“Strong personality”

Gregory Diamos is one of those who witnessed the turn of this son of an Italian immigrant.

While working at China's Baidu, he remembers receiving a "completely off the mark" application from a physicist and biologist who had "neither experience in engineering nor in AI".

He nevertheless takes a look at his work and finds "one of the best (programming) codes I have ever seen. If this self-taught computer scientist was capable of doing that, he could get by with us."

Faced with trained engineers, some of whom looked down on him, "he worked harder than everyone else", according to Gregory Diamos.

During this short year at Baidu, a temperament emerges.

In this team of 300 people, "he had one of the strongest personalities", always ready to debate concepts and research directions, reports Gregory Diamos. “And he had no problem challenging researchers with much more experience than him.”

These differences of opinion are what will push him, according to the engineer, to leave Baidu to join Google.

Then moving to OpenAI, he left, there too, due to disagreements over the company's strategy, believing that AI security was relegated to the background.

“When you realize the impact this work is going to have on the world, you can't help but speak your mind and try to have an influence,” suggests Gregory Diamos.

Last weekend, a sketch on the show "Saturday Night Live" presented Dario Amodei as a tortured character, poorly hiding his anxiety about AI.

“We see that there is a struggle in him, on the way he sees AI, which is encouraging,” considers Stephen Henriques. "Is there a bit of marketing strategy mixed into this too? Maybe."

© 2026 AFP

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