Don’t bother applying for a job at Anthropic if your goal is to be the star of the show.
That was one of the first things Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei emphasized on Friday, in a live-streamed interview with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon ahead of the AI startup’s hotly anticipated IPO.
Amodei said the company has been “very disciplined about turning down people who are deeply technically talented,” but don’t fit its culture. The company’s recent IPO filing stated that its workforce grew from about 940 employees at the end of 2024 to about 5,300 as of late September.
“We don’t want people who are jerks. We don’t want people who try to steal the show and don’t work well with others. We don’t want people who aren’t oriented towards the public benefit,” Amodei told Dimon.
Amodei, who worked as vice president of research at 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 devotes 40% to 50% of his time to focusing on those priorities.
‘High-trust, low-ego’
The CEO said that talent and culture create technology, and the company’s presence and how it’s viewed by the public comes from the talent and intentions of the people who build that technology. Amodei said he and his six cofounders decided at the company’s founding that talent and culture would be their priority.
“If you stick to that consistently, it’s painful in the short run. 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 the most senior 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 said he speaks to the company about what’s going on.
Amodei said he tries not to hide things from staff and doesn’t rely on corporate jargon. That creates an environment where employees can trust leaders and leaders can trust employees, he said.
“Everyone feels that we’re being honest with them,” Amodei said, adding that this carries “enormous value.”
A focus on retention
Amodei told Dimon that the approach works because employees share the same values and a common goal. Whether the task is training a model, meeting a safety objective, building a product, or advancing a policy priority, “the whole company comes together to make it happen,” he said.
Amodei said that maintaining that kind of environment has helped with retention, which is critical given the company’s dependence on senior leaders and key technical team members. Amodei said that all seven cofounders, including himself, are still at the company, along with over three-quarters of its first 100 employees. In its IPO filing, Anthropic said it experienced only about 1% “regrettable attrition” in a 12-month period.
Amodei added that it’s a “relatively frequent” occurrence for employees to come back after leaving. He said two major product employees left and came back after two weeks.
“They said, ‘Sorry, we didn’t appreciate what we had,'” Amodei said about their return.
