Don’t bother applying for a job at Anthropic if your goal is to be the star of the show.
That’s one of the first things Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pointed out Friday, in a live-streamed interview with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, ahead of the AI startup’s highly anticipated IPO.
Amodei said the company had been “very disciplined in turning away people who were very technically talented” but didn’t fit its culture. The company’s recent IPO filing indicated that its workforce had fallen from around 940 employees at the end of 2024 to around 5,300 at the end of September.
“We don’t want people who are jerks. We don’t want people who try to steal the spotlight and who don’t work well with others. We don’t want people who are not oriented toward the public good,” Amodei told Dimon.
Amodei, who worked as vice president of research at OpenAI and was a senior research scientist at Google Brain, said talent and culture “are the most important things” for a company. He said he now spends 40 to 50 percent of his time focusing on those priorities.
“High confidence, low ego”
The CEO said that talent and culture create technology, and the company’s presence and how it is perceived by the public comes from the talent and intentions of the people who build it. technology. Amodei said he and his six co-founders decided when starting the company that talent and culture would be their priority.
“If you stick to it consistently, it’s painful in the short term. But you get a team where everyone works together and everyone is on the same side,” Amodei said.
Anthropic describes itself as a “high-trust, low-ego organization” on its website and, in its IPO filing, said that “teams operate in a truth-seeking environment where the best argument wins, not the loudest voice or highest title.”
Amodei told Dimon that he encourages other leaders to demonstrate honesty and trust. He said that every two weeks he holds a “Dario Vision Quest,” an all-hands meeting where he talks to the company about what’s going on.
Amodei said he tries not to hide certain things from staff and doesn’t rely on company jargon. This creates an environment where employees can trust leaders and leaders can trust employees, he said.
“Everyone feels like we’re being honest with them,” Amodei said, adding that there’s “tremendous value” in that.
A focus on retention
Amodei told Dimon that the approach works because employees share the same values and a common goal. Whether it’s training a model, meeting a security goal, building a product or advancing a policy priority, “the whole company comes together to make it happen,” he said.
Amodei said maintaining this type of environment has helped with retention, which is critical given the company’s reliance on senior leaders and key technical team members. Amodei said all seven co-founders, including himself, are still with the company, along with more than three-quarters of its original 100 employees. In its IPO filing, Anthropic said it only experienced “regrettable attrition” of about 1% over a 12-month period.
Amodei added that it is “relatively common” for employees to return after they leave. He said two key product employees left and returned after two weeks.
“They said, ‘Sorry, we didn’t enjoy what we had,’” Amodei said of their return.
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