Day 1/30: Daniela Amodei—The Safety-First Maverick Who Walked Away from OpenAI
You’ve seen the headline—“She helped build GPT-3…then quit OpenAI.”
But that’s the surface. Most people don’t know what really happened when Daniela Amodei tapped out of the hottest AI lab in the world.
“Why on Earth Would She Walk Away from OpenAI?”
On paper, Daniela Amodei had already “won.”
She was in every tech whisper-circle: the people-ops guru who helped Stripe slash fraud by 72%, then the safety czar at OpenAI during GPT-3’s birth. She sat in rooms where engineers argued about token counts and attention heads—while she kept asking, “But what about existential risk?”
Then one afternoon in 2020, she and six other insiders (including her brother, Dario) dropped their badges and walked out of OpenAI’s sleek San Francisco office.
No press tour. No “I’m following my passion” excuse. Just seven people daring to say, “We’d rather build something safer than chase the next headline.”
Here’s the messy part nobody wrote about:
She didn’t have a plan.
No venture checks. No polished pitch deck.
Just a battered sense of responsibility and a conviction that “playing it safe” in AI meant something very different—something that looked almost reckless to many.
That’s where Anthropic comes in. Today, it’s a $61.5 billion lab backing “constitution-trained” models—code that literally can’t flip off its ethical switch.
They’ve raised $8 billion.
They’re in partnership talks with Amazon and Google (and others). But it all started with a handful of stubborn contrarians who refused to “move fast and break things.”
Unlock the Rest of Daniela’s Story—And Your 30-Day Growth Blueprint
Want to know exactly how Daniela convinced VCs to back a company that said “safety first” instead of “scale first”? Curious how she juggles being a mother, musician, and literature grad while raising billions for AI safety? And—most importantly—how you can swipe that same “values-over-valuation” firewall for your own project?
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