Anthropic targets $1.4 trillion IPO valuation behind self-taught CEO

Anthropic is preparing for a Wall Street IPO at a targeted valuation of up to $1.4 trillion, and the company betting its future on AI safety is run by a biophysicist who never earned a computer science degree. At 43, Dario Amodei sits at the center of the global debate over artificial intelligence — pouring billions into ever more powerful models while warning, relentlessly, that they could pose existential risks to humanity.

The company is best known for its language model Claude. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, hardly a neutral observer in the AI race, puts Amodei in rare company: "I consider him one of the great legends of the tech and business world." For a founder who swapped retina research for self-taught coding, that's a long arc.

How does a biophysicist end up running an AI lab?

Amodei, the son of Italian immigrants, grew up in San Francisco. He took a conventional academic start — a PhD from Princeton University in New Jersey, where he studied mechanisms of the retina. His doctoral adviser Michael Berry remembers a scientific idealist with a clear plan: build complex tools to cure diseases. "He wanted to tackle the big problems," Berry said.

Not everyone from that period paints the same portrait. Olivier Marre, who worked with Amodei at Princeton on a retinal analysis device and now serves as research director at France's INSERM, saw ambition more than ethics. "I didn't see in him someone who grapples intensively with moral or ethical questions," Marre said. "Dario was ambitious, wanted success and recognition for it, but not in an excessive or unusual way."

After his PhD, Amodei worked at Stanford in California on protein analysis, then taught himself programming. At his job interview with Chinese search giant Baidu, he convinced chip pioneer Gregory Diamos with outstanding code — despite having no IT degree. Diamos describes a tireless worker who programmed better than far more experienced researchers.

His stints were short. Baidu, then Google, then a 2016 move to OpenAI. In 2021 he left, together with his sister Daniela Amodei and other colleagues, over fundamental strategic differences and the fear that AI safety research was losing ground to commercial goals. Anthropic was born from that rupture, with safety as its founding promise.

What does the IPO structure lock in?

The Amodei siblings' circle is closely tied to the Effective Altruism movement, though Anthropic insists Amodei doesn't consider himself part of it and the company follows no fixed ideology. The structure tells its own story: Anthropic is registered as a public benefit corporation, and to preserve that orientation after the market listing, the founders plan to retain 50.1 percent of voting rights through a special class of shares.

Amodei's advocacy has made him a contentious figure in Washington. After he and other leaders called for slowing AI development in September 2026, Anthropic handed US legislators its own draft bill in October. Under the proposal, the US government could block dangerous AI models when harm looms — subject to sign-off from a federal judge.

Idealist or strategist?

President Donald Trump dismissed Amodei's warnings, and Anthropic was temporarily excluded from Pentagon contracts. Critics, including Trump's former AI adviser David Sacks, accuse the company and its chief of pushing regulation as a moat against competitors.

Whether Amodei is a conscience-driven idealist or a skilled tactician in the tech race remains hotly debated. What's certain: no other contemporary entrepreneur embodies the tension between scientific responsibility, state regulation, and the immense capital of the AI boom quite like him.