Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the most important thing he does each day has nothing to do with training AI models or shipping products. Instead, he said, he spends almost half his time working on company culture.
“I think we’ve done an extraordinarily good job, even if not perfect, of holding the company together, making everyone feel the mission, that we’re sincere about the mission, and that everyone has faith that everyone else there is working for the right reason,” he said.
Key to Amodei’s approach to culture is constant communication and extreme sincerity. Amodei said he speaks candidly about his vision for the company in a biweekly all-hands he called a “DVQ,” short for Dario Vision Quest—a name he tried to resist at first because of its potential psychedelic connotation.
Amodei says he speaks plainly with his employees, answering questions and avoiding what he calls “corpo speak.” He also has an active Slack channel where he writes responses to employee questions or his own thoughts about the company throughout the week.
Amodei’s blunt approach to communication echoes the “radical transparency” leadership style pioneered by Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio. As part of his management style, Dalio encourages employees to give honest feedback even to senior members of the firm. Dalio argues the method helps improve the company’s standards, but some critics have said allowing a no-holds-barred culture of communication could potentially make employees more closed off.
Yet when it comes to company issues, Amodei said on the podcast, he takes an “unfiltered” approach. Inside Anthropic, he can be completely candid with his employees about the company’s direction and the issues it faces. That openness, he said, is what keeps everyone on the same page—even as pressure may be building externally.
“The point is to get a reputation of telling the company the truth about what’s happening, to call things what they are, to acknowledge problems, to avoid the sort of ‘corpo speak,’ the kind of defensive communication that often is necessary in public,” he said. “But if you have a company of people who you trust—and we try to hire people that we trust—then you can really just be entirely unfiltered.”
