Dario & Daniela Amodei: "This Is Gonna Determine the Fate of Nations and the Future of Humanity”

Dario and Daniela Amodei, the siblings behind Anthropic, left OpenAI to pursue a different, “more human” approach to the technology. Their promise is to put AI safety and ethics at the center of the tech race… but with an IPO around the corner, can those principles survive the pressure to win?
Walter invites the co-founders to explain how they teach Claude right from wrong, what they’ve discovered about AI’s capacity for deception and self-preservation, and why they drew red lines with the Pentagon. Plus, the co-founders talk about Elon Musk's Neuralink and why they’re not interested in integrating AI into their minds.
Interview taped July 6, 2026.
And be sure to pick up Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, wherever fine books are sold.
ABOUT THE HOST
Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Elon Musk, Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane University and previously served as CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair and CEO of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023.
ABOUT DARIO AMODEI
Dario Amodei co-founded Anthropic and leads the company’s research direction and strategic vision for developing AI systems. He is known for his work on AI safety and is the co-inventor of the reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) technique, a method for training AI systems to align with human values and preferences. Dario’s research on scaling laws was foundational to the modern AI industry. Before co-founding Anthropic, Dario served as Vice President of Research at OpenAI, where he led the development of large language models such as GPT-2 and GPT-3. Prior to OpenAI, Dario was a Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain.
ABOUT DANIELA AMODEI
Daniela Amodei co-founded Anthropic and serves as chair of its Board of Directors. As President, she leads the organization’s work across research, engineering, product, governance, and commercial execution and manages the executive team. Before co-founding Anthropic, Daniela served as Vice President of Safety and Policy at OpenAI, where she led efforts to ensure the safe development and deployment of AI systems. Prior to her work in the AI industry, Daniela was Head of Risk Operations at Stripe, where she oversaw risk management and compliance.
IN THIS SEASON
Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, xAI)
Peter Thiel (Founders Fund, PayPal, Palantir)
Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI, DeepMind)
Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei (Anthropic)
and more!
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