President Daniela Amodei's Husband Hired to Work on Anthropic AI Safety Plan

Anthropic, the fast-growing AI company valued at $60 billion, has quietly hired the husband of cofounder and president Daniela Amodei to assist with safety strategy, adding another family connection to the startup led by brother and sister Daniela and CEO Dario Amodei.

Daniela Amodei's husband, Holden Karnofksy, joined Anthropic last month as a member of the startup's "technical staff," according to a company spokesperson. The company had not announced Karnofsky's hiring, but he recently updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect his new role. 

Karnofsky is an AI safety researcher and philanthropist who is closely associated with Effective Altruism, a philanthropic movement focused on AI's existential risks that has gained both influence and controversy in recent years. Karnofsky previously served on OpenAI's board.

According to two people with direct knowledge of the matter and confirmed by Anthropic, Karnofsky is working on the company's "Responsible Scaling Policy," which is a set of protocols for managing public and societal risk associated with powerful AI models. Both sources, whose identities are known to Fortune, were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about company matters.

Anthropic confirmed that Karnofsky works on trust and safety issues, describing his title as "a member of the technical staff" reporting to Jared Kaplan, Chief Science Officer. 

"He is working on the responsible scaling policy and other aspects around safety planning ahead of highly advanced AI systems," a spokesperson told me.

With Karnofsky's addition to the company, Anthropic now has three close family members in influential positions. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei were among a group of early OpenAI employees who left the company in late 2020 to form Anthropic, citing concerns that OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, was becoming overly focused on commercial products while undervaluing AI safety research.

Anthropic also recently hired Niki Parmar, the only female member of the Google AI research team that created the Transformer in 2017, a type of neural network design that serves as the foundation for all modern generative AI models.