Anthropic CEO's wife wields influence as $2 trillion IPO nears

Cami Clark, wife of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, has served as a strategic adviser and investor conduit, helping secure a key early backer as Anthropic races toward a $2 trillion IPO.

Schmidt told Bloomberg he was impressed with the couple's ideas when he visited their San Francisco apartment in 2018, months before backing Anthropic's $124 million Series A round in May 2021.

Clark, born in Reno, Nev., in 1979, dropped out of architecture school and filed for bankruptcy in 2009 after a lender foreclosed on her San Francisco apartment. She previously co-founded Eddice, a women-focused "free luxury porn" company, and unsuccessfully pitched convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to invest. She dated Schmidt from 2011 to 2014 before starting a relationship with Amodei in 2014.

As Anthropic hurtles toward an IPO that could top $2 trillion as soon as this fall, Clark is one of the most influential voices shaping decisions at a company at the forefront of the AI industry. The company also faces an ongoing standoff with the Trump administration over Pentagon usage restrictions that has drawn unwanted attention ahead of the listing.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Clark, who married Amodei in 2022, acts as a sounding board and strategic adviser for the CEO. She introduced Amodei to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who became an early investor in Anthropic's $124 million Series A round. Clark also introduced Mira Murati, one of her closest friends, to OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, according to people familiar with the matter.

Clark's influence extends to political circles. At the Sun Valley conference in July, she had lunch with Ivanka Trump, a friend, and chatted with Jared Kushner, whom Amodei had approached earlier in the year to invest, people familiar with the matter said. She has recently told people involved in politics that the company sees its mission as protecting America and isn't as "woke" as its detractors might think, according to people familiar with the matter.

A $124 Million Introduction

Clark's path to Anthropic's inner circle began long before the company existed. After her relationship with Schmidt ended in 2014, she began dating Amodei, then a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University School of Medicine. She spent time at the group house in San Francisco where Amodei, his friend Holden Karnofsky, and his sister Daniela lived with other key figures from the AI safety and Effective Altruism worlds.

When tensions arose between Amodei and OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Brockman over who wielded power at the startup, Amodei, his sister, and five other employees left to found Anthropic in December 2020. In February 2021, Clark pitched Schmidt on creating a venture fund called the Mother of AGI Fund, which would formalize her involvement in Anthropic and manage Schmidt's investment, according to a 40-page proposal reviewed by the Journal. Others at Anthropic, including Daniela Amodei, didn't support the plan, and it didn't move forward.

Epstein Emails and a Bankruptcy Filing

Clark's early career was marked by a series of ventures, some of which drew scrutiny. Around 2010, she and Michelle Capocefalo started Eddice, a women-focused "free luxury porn" company with the tagline "intellectually promiscuous." The company raised funds through crowdsourcing after PayPal froze its account.

In 2011, Clark and Capocefalo met literary agent John Brockman at a Munich conference, who introduced them to Epstein. Emails released by the Justice Department show Clark pitched Epstein on investing in Eddice and later a "social dieting app" called Female Algorithm Technologies. Epstein, then a registered sex offender, declined, writing "Can't do sex TV."

Clark's personal financial history also includes a brief marriage at age 20 to 64-year-old Reno architect Waldemar Eklof III, and a bankruptcy filing in 2009.

Anthropic's Claude chatbot is the chief rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT, and its Claude Code tool has been embraced by millions of engineers. The company's Mythos model, capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, rattled markets and stoked calls by some White House officials for more federal oversight. As the company approaches its IPO, questions about governance and the influence of a non-executive spouse could factor into institutional investor due diligence. Anthropic also faces the Pentagon supply-chain risk designation, which the company has challenged in court.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.