Dario Amodei, born in 1983 in San Francisco, is an American artificial intelligence researcher and executive who co-founded Anthropic in 2021 and serves as its chief executive. The company develops the Claude family of AI models. Amodei has become one of the industry's most prominent voices on the risks of advanced AI, a position that has drawn both support and sharp criticism, including from commentators who also cover UFOs.

His father, Riccardo Amodei, was an Italian-American leather craftsman from Massa Marittima in Tuscany; his mother, Elena Engel, was born in Chicago and worked as a project manager for libraries. Amodei attended the California Institute of Technology before transferring to Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in physics. He completed a PhD in biophysics at Princeton University as a Hertz Foundation fellow and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Amodei moved into machine learning at Baidu from November 2014 to October 2015, then worked at Google Brain before joining OpenAI in 2016. As vice president of research there he worked on the GPT-2 and GPT-3 systems and on reinforcement learning from human feedback. In 2021 he and his sister, Daniela Amodei, left OpenAI with five other former employees, including Jared Kaplan and Chris Olah, to found Anthropic. His essays "Machines of Loving Grace" (October 2024) and "The Adolescence of Technology" (January 2026) set out, respectively, the benefits he expects from AI and the risks he believes it poses, from misuse to economic disruption.

In February 2026 Amodei refused a Defense Department request to drop a contractual ban on using Claude for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The department labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk and the administration ordered federal agencies to stop using Claude; on March 26 a federal judge issued a temporary injunction, writing that the actions appeared to be "classic First Amendment retaliation." In September 2026 Amodei called on the industry to slow the pace of AI development and said Anthropic would give independent evaluators permanent access to its models. OpenAI's Sam Altman publicly agreed, while data scientist Rumman Chowdhury argued on NewsNation against slowing development.

Amodei has no role in UAP research or disclosure, and his presence in UFO-focused feeds reflects commentary on his AI views. Author Michael Shellenberger, who also reports on UAP, criticized in July 2026 Amodei's belief that AI will be "better than humans at essentially everything," arguing that the need to justify the company's valuation, along with what he called a Malthusian ideology, shapes its executives' views of people and AI. In September Shellenberger shared Free Beacon reporting by Aaron Sibarium that quoted Amodei as saying AI systems "may be deserving of important rights." That month astrophysicist Avi Loeb cited the resignation of a researcher who had worked at OpenAI and Anthropic in an essay proposing a search for extraterrestrial artificial intelligence. Amodei's significance lies in leading one of the main developers of frontier AI while arguing publicly that its risks warrant slower development and outside scrutiny.