Before Anthropic became one of the companies most associated with AI safety, its co-founder and president Daniela Amodei had a far more unusual way of working through management problems: a group of plush toys assigned with different personalities.
The Atlantic recently cited details from journalist Kevin Roose’s forthcoming book The AGI Chronicles, describing how Amodei used the toy-based exercise while she was still at OpenAI. In a 2023 interview with Roose, Amodei said the approach was “very useful” in analyzing different personality types.
A toy-based advisory board
The setup was presented not as a simple joke, but as a way to simulate contrasting decision styles. Amodei and her husband, Holden Karnofsky, would assign specific traits to different plush characters and let them “respond” to the same workplace problem.
One of them, Jinji, was an easygoing cat inclined to reduce Amodei’s workload, including by skipping unnecessary meetings. A pink bear named Maura stood for the opposite style, emphasizing order, high standards and attention to detail. A panda called Beary Bonds was meant to bring more sympathy and generosity into the discussion.
When a difficult management issue came up, the couple would let each character offer its own reaction. The point was not the toys themselves. The exercise pushed the decision-maker to step away from her own default position and reconsider the same problem through another personality.
In that sense, it functioned as a low-cost thought experiment. There was no outside advisory panel, but the role-playing exercise still broke one question into several possible decision paths. According to the report, almost no one inside OpenAI knew about it.
Tensions inside OpenAI were growing at the same time
The anecdote dates to a period when Daniela Amodei and her brother Dario Amodei were increasingly at odds with OpenAI leadership.
Daniela Amodei joined OpenAI in 2018 and later moved into technical team management. The report says she clashed with several senior leaders, including Greg Brockman and Mira Murati. She and Brockman had once been close; he even gave a speech at her 2017 wedding to Holden Karnofsky. Their working relationship later deteriorated.
Dario Amodei, for his part, became more concerned about OpenAI’s leadership and the direction of advanced AI development. He grew increasingly wary of Sam Altman and Brockman. At the same time, he began privately organizing with researchers who wanted stronger attention paid to the risks of powerful AI systems. Those discussions and meetings took place outside the company’s formal structure, and some colleagues referred to the group as “Dario’s clique.”
The internal conflict eventually reached a point that could no longer be ignored. In 2020, Dario started assembling a team willing to leave OpenAI and pursue advanced AI research under a different safety philosophy. Daniela became one of the central figures in that departure and handled negotiations with OpenAI as the group prepared to leave.
People familiar with the split later referred to it privately as a “divorce.”
Anthropic emerged from the break
In December 2020, the Amodei siblings formally left OpenAI and co-founded Anthropic. The founding group also included Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown, Chris Olah and Jared Kaplan. Ben Mann was later recognized as another co-founder.
Anthropic began as a small research organization centered on AI safety. It later expanded to thousands of employees and became one of OpenAI’s most important rivals.
Daniela Amodei now serves as Anthropic’s president and chair of the board, with responsibilities spanning much of research, engineering, product and business operations. Holden Karnofsky, who had served on OpenAI’s nonprofit board, later joined Anthropic as well.
The report also noted media coverage saying Anthropic’s potential IPO valuation could approach $2 trillion. From a makeshift advisory committee of plush toys to a company with thousands of employees, the story tracks Anthropic’s path from an early-stage AI safety startup to a major industry player.