“In some ways I really think of myself as a generalist… if you look through my background, you would [say], ‘what is this lady actually good at?’ Right? ‘She doesn't have a law degree. She's not a computer scientist,’” says Daniela Amodei, president and cofounder of Anthropic, in an interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business in May.

“But the ability to be curious, [to] learn across a lot of disciplines and to have a strong foundation of wanting to have impact, regardless of the area that you're working in, I think that is an underrated quality.”

That ethos has worked for Amodei, who at 38 is arguably the most powerful woman in AI—and now suddenly the second-richest self-made woman in America. Thanks to Anthropic’s recent mega funding round, which raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, the English literature graduate from University of Santa Cruz is now worth an estimated $15.5 billion, up nearly 13-fold from $1.2 billion a year ago.

It also helped shape the ethos of the AI giant that she started with her brother Dario and five others after all seven left OpenAI in December 2020. Back when the company was worth just $183 billion, the Anthropic cofounders all announced plans to eventually give away 80% of their wealth. “Look, we are going to be a commercial entity. We think there's going to be a lot of economic value that's going to be created by artificial intelligence, but it's really important to us that we do this the right way,” she says during the Stanford interview. “I would say for this generation… this concept that being in business doesn't have to be in tension........

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