Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has only one direct report

For all of his influence at Anthropic PBC, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei has just one direct report at the artificial intelligence company.

That’s unusual in the technology sector, where many leaders are eliminating layers of management and widening spans of control. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has around half a dozen direct reports, while Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang says he has 60 people reporting to him.

Anthropic is testing a different version of leadership, one where the CEO protects nearly all of his time for big-picture conversations, organizational culture, and giving input on research direction and strategy, rather than managing people in senior leadership roles. The company’s executive team reports instead to Dario’s sister, Anthropic President Daniela Amodei, who handles much of the company’s day-to-day operations and reports to Anthropic’s board. The only person Dario directly supervises is his chief of staff, Avital Balwit.


“It’s incredibly freeing,” Dario told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in an interview on The Circuit. “It lets me do all the things that I do much more easily than I would otherwise.”

For Dario, a first-time startup founder and Princeton biophysics PhD who spent the early years of his career in the lab as a researcher, that often means philosophizing about artificial intelligence and what it means for humanity, both in companywide “vision quests” — employee meetings where he reflects on a wide range of subjects — and in lengthy public essays.

“In many ways it’s a zoom-in versus zoom-out thing. It’s very hard to pay attention to the strategic picture if there's, like, a zillion things you have to handle tomorrow,” he said. “And so it often makes a lot of sense to separate those things from each other, so that you can do both of them well.”

Dario was a vice president of research at OpenAI before leaving after disagreements with the ChatGPT maker’s leadership and co-founding Anthropic in 2021. He previously was a senior research scientist at Google. Daniela has had more experience navigating the people side of tech startups, both in her time as an early employee at Stripe and in leading safety and policy teams at OpenAI.

Anthropic, valued at nearly $1 trillion in its latest funding round, is racing to go public before OpenAI does. The company hired seasoned tech executives including Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao in 2024 and and Chief Commercial Officer Paul Smith in 2025 to support the company’s rapid expansion. They work alongside all seven co-founders of Anthropic, whose ongoing presence has been touted by the Amodeis as a sign of the startup’s cohesive culture.

Dario estimated he spends “probably half” his time talking to staff “about the culture of Anthropic and how the culture works,” and said that maintaining the company’s culture is probably his and Daniela’s “number one top priority,” he said.

“When you’re growing this fast, you’re hiring a bunch of people from big tech companies. If you don’t tell them how Anthropic operates, they’ll simply recapitulate the only thing they know, which is how to operate at the companies that they came from,” he said.

Beyond a matter of personal preference or leadership style, the number of reports a CEO manages also can reflect the nature of the organization’s work, according to Raffaella Sadun, an economist and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. If you think about a firm as a machine that processes problems, she said, workers at the bottom rungs handle routine issues while harder problems and exceptions move upward. That means a CEO can have a wide span when other leaders in the organization are seasoned, self-sufficient experts in the types of problems that reach their desks, but may need a narrower one when the company — Anthropic, for example — faces a steady stream of novel, high-stakes problems that require more high-level judgment.

In either case, the org chart must be carefully considered. “The time of the manager is the scarcest resource,” Sadun said. Ideally the corporate structure is designed to protect it.