She tops the list of the youngest female billionaires.
The AI wave is reshuffling the global rich list.
This week, Forbes released its latest 400 Richest Americans list. 39-year-old Daniela Amodei made her debut on the list, ranking 75th jointly with an estimated net worth of 15.5 billion US dollars, equivalent to about 100 billion yuan.
Daniela is also the youngest woman on the list, making her the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.
She is the co-founder and president of Anthropic, and is more widely known to the public as the younger sister of Dario Amodei, the company's CEO. She is not just a deputy behind her brother, but also serves as the chair of the board of directors, managing the company's executive team.
It may be hard to imagine that the world's largest AI company with a trillion-dollar valuation that is about to go public, the person actually in charge of its daily operations is a liberal arts graduate with a literature degree.
39 years old, with a net worth of 100 billion yuan
Before stepping into the center of power in the AI world, Daniela Amodei hardly looked like a Silicon Valley AI founder.
Born in 1987, her father Ricardo is a leather craftsman from Tuscany, Italy, while her mother has long been engaged in project management for library construction and renovation.
Her older brother Dario was obsessed with mathematics and physics from an early age, and later obtained a doctorate in biophysics from Princeton University; Daniela took a different path — she got a scholarship for her proficiency in classical flute, entered the University of California, Santa Cruz, and finally earned a degree in English literature.
The Amodei siblings
One of her favorite writers in college was Joan Didion. Daniela later explained that she admired Didion because the latter could see the shadows behind the prosperity in an era full of optimism. This has almost become her way of talking about AI in the future: acknowledging the great hope brought by technology, while keeping an eye on its worst possible outcomes.
After graduating from college, Daniela was initially concerned about poverty, conflict and global health issues. She moved from the field of international development to political campaigns, and was later appointed as the scheduling director of its Washington office.
In 2013, Daniela left the political circle and joined Stripe, a little-known payment startup at the time, becoming the company's first head of recruitment. For nearly six years after that, she worked her way up from talent recruitment to head of risk operations, managing fraud, compliance and risk businesses.
Stripe also gave her a first-hand look at how a company grows from dozens of people into a global tech giant. More importantly, Stripe was co-founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison — Daniela later admitted that she was inspired by the two brothers: "If they can start a business together, why can't we?"
In 2018, Daniela joined OpenAI. She has no computer science degree and is not a technical genius, but she successively served as vice president of engineering management, people management, and safety and policy, participating in the management of the research engineering team and the organizational work during the GPT-2 era.
By the end of 2020, in the OpenAI office in San Francisco, USA, the two siblings decided to resign. Two months after they left, Anthropic was born.
The subsequent story exceeded everyone's imagination: ChatGPT was launched, sparking a global AI revolution; OpenAI rose to become a hot super unicorn, while the once little-known Anthropic also became OpenAI's biggest rival.
The largest IPO in history
With Daniela at the helm, the largest IPO in history is coming.
The latest news is that Anthropic plans to go public in November, with an expected listing valuation of 2 trillion US dollars or even higher. If achieved, Anthropic will surpass the record set by SpaceX in June this year.
This came a little later than the outside world expected.
Some Anthropic consultants believe that delaying to November will give the company time to show its Q3 financial data to prove its competitive position.
After all, Anthropic has already demonstrated amazing explosive growth in financial data. In January 2025, Anthropic's annualized revenue was 1 billion US dollars; it climbed to 9 billion US dollars by the end of 2025, reached 14 billion US dollars in February 2026, exceeded 30 billion US dollars in April, and broke through the 47 billion US dollar mark in May.
It achieved 47-fold growth in less than 18 months. As of the end of July 2026, this figure has exceeded 65 billion US dollars.
On the other hand, this has also attracted more and more investors to place their bets, performing the magic of valuation growth — in February, Anthropic completed a 30 billion US dollar financing, with its valuation rising to 380 billion US dollars; just three months later, it completed another 65 billion US dollar financing, and the post-investment valuation soared to 965 billion US dollars. At this point, Anthropic's valuation surpassed that of OpenAI, making it the world's highest-valued AI unicorn.
There are still many investors who missed the ride trying to seize the last opportunity — on the private secondary market, Anthropic's valuation has been pushed to 1.5 trillion US dollars, "but almost no one is willing to sell."
A more aggressive expectation has emerged in the market: if Anthropic's annual revenue growth rate can reach 800%, even with a conservative estimate, the company's valuation should reach 30 times its revenue, corresponding to a market value of 3 trillion US dollars.
In that case, Anthropic will create a wealth feast beyond imagination.
Although Anthropic has not yet publicly released its prospectus and the details of internal shareholdings are unknown, the trillion-dollar valuation has obviously made the founding team behind it achieve financial freedom. Today, the 7 co-founders have all entered the global rich list, and four of them, including Daniela Amodei, are under 40 years old and have already become billionaires.
Since its establishment in 2021, Anthropic has been backed by the world's top tech capitals — dozens of institutions including Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Salesforce and Sequoia Capital have all placed their bets on it.
Now, it's just waiting for the listing bell to ring.
Life turnarounds are often hidden in unexpected choices
"Achieve financial freedom in two or three years." This is a life opportunity with a lower probability than winning a tens of millions of dollars lottery prize.
But in the AI era, such cases are everywhere. Still at Anthropic, wealth belongs not only to the founders, but also to many ordinary employees.
Foreign media once reported a real case: a mid-level technical employee joined Anthropic in 2024, getting an annual salary of 400,000 US dollars plus 1.3 million US dollars in equity. By July 2026, the company's valuation rose from 18 billion US dollars to 965 billion US dollars, and the equity in his hand surged by more than 5000% to 72 million US dollars.
It is undeniable that the dividends of the AI era are quietly flowing to a group of ordinary employees.
At Anthropic's biggest rival OpenAI, there are already people holding huge amounts of cash.
According to The Wall Street Journal, a few months ago OpenAI allowed current and former employees to cash out a total of about 6.6 billion US dollars. More than 600 employees cashed out about 11 million US dollars on average; among them, the upper limit of cashing out for about 75 core members was raised to 30 million US dollars per person.
This led to a Versailles-like scene: some Silicon Valley employees were at a loss for the sudden wealth, "The whole life plan has been completely disrupted."
The flow of wealth has far-reaching impacts.
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Investment" (ID: pedaily2012), written by Wu Qiong and Chen Jia, authorized for release by 36Kr.