Anthropic president Daniela Amodei had personal advisory council, used stuffed animals for conflicts

Anthropic co-founder and president Daniela Amodei and her husband Holden Karnofsky seem to have a special way of handling workplace conflict. It is believed that the couple used stuffed animals as a personal advisory council for “managerial role-playing.”

As per a report from the Atlantic, Daniela Amodei and Holden Karnofsky used a collection of stuffed animals to work through workplace conflicts. These toys were assigned a name, character profile, and even a management style. The report was adapted from journalist Kevin Roose’s upcoming book, The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence.

Daniela is the sister of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. She co-founded Anthropic along with Dario and five other former OpenAI employees in 2021.

Daniela Amodei’s stuffed-animal council

The report says that this stuffed animal council was created back when Daniela and Holden were still at OpenAI. It is said that Daniela used the stuffed animals as a way of managerial role-playing. But the report adds that she treated it as something between “an inside joke and an earnest management technique.”

For this, each stuffed animal was given its own personality. The report says Jinji was a lazy cat who encouraged her to “cancel meetings and avoid taking on too much work.” Then, there was Maura, a pink bear, who was a detail-oriented manager with a type-A personality. A type-A personality usually describes someone who is highly competitive and focused on time management. The council also had a panda named Beary Bonds. It was described as the “patron bear of generosity and empathy.”

As per the author, Daniela Amodei believes that animals could be “very useful in analysing different personality types.” Though, it is unclear whether she actually took the advice from this mechanism seriously. Not many at OpenAI at the time were even aware of this council.

Daniela Amodei had joined OpenAI alongside Dario in 2018. During their time at the company, the two siblings had become increasingly frustrated with the company’s leadership and internal culture. The report says that the two eventually formed what some called “Dario’s clique,” creating private Slack channels and holding separate meetings focused heavily on AI safety.

By 2020, Dario Amodei had begun recruiting colleagues to leave OpenAI and start a new company with a stronger focus on AI safety. Daniela joined him as one of Anthropic’s original seven co-founders, alongside Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown, Chris Olah and Jared Kaplan. Ben Mann was later added as an eighth co-founder.

Anthropic was founded in 2021. Daniela’s husband, Holden, resigned from OpenAI’s board of directors the same year. The report said Daniela also led negotiations with OpenAI over the group’s departure, which the founders privately referred to as “the divorce.” It is unclear whether she has a similar stuffed animal council at Anthropic.

Since then, Anthropic has grown to thousands of employees and become one of OpenAI’s biggest rivals. Daniela Amodei is now Anthropic’s president and board chair, overseeing research, engineering, product, governance and commercial operations, while Karnofsky joined Anthropic’s technical staff last year. Anthropic now seeks to go public with an IPO before the end of this year, potentially at a $2 trillion valuation.