Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 and is its CEO; Forbes puts his net worth at $15.5B (2 Oct 2026). Anthropic was the first AI company approved for US classified settings, and Claude is integrated in the Pentagon's Maven Smart System, built by Palantir under a $1.3B contract, which generates and ranks targets. In February 2026 Amodei refused Pentagon demands to drop two limits, no fully autonomous weapons and no mass domestic surveillance; Donald Trump then ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic and Military Secretary Pete Hegseth declared it a supply-chain risk. The next day the US and Israel attacked Iran, and a US Tomahawk strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab killed 156 people, 120 of them children. Asked in June 2026 whether Claude was used in that targeting, Amodei said: 'We don't have access to, we don't know exactly how these models were used,' adding that 'a human makes the final decision.' Two red lines were drawn; the targeting itself was not one of them.