Anthropic paid chief executive Dario Amodei $18 million for 2025, according to its unpublished IPO prospectus seen by Reuters, with stock and option awards making up most of the pay. The pack
Anthropic paid chief executive Dario Amodei $18 million for 2025, according to its unpublished IPO prospectus seen by Reuters, with stock and option awards making up most of the pay.
The package puts him in the middle of the pack of big-tech bosses, while the listing ahead of it could value Anthropic at more than $2 trillion.
The document omits the one number founders care about most, their ownership stakes. And depending on the final IPO pricing, those holdings may be worth billions of dollars.
Both Amodei and his sister Daniela, Anthropic’s president, saw their salaries doubled to $1.4 million in July; her total package for 2025 was $16.4 million.
The two siblings are to get more equity. This year, the board pledged them restricted stock units, some of the payout contingent on their staying at Anthropic, and some on the listing.
The finance chief, Krishna Rao, was hired in 2024 with options on 1.4 million shares, earned $720,250 in 2025, and exercised options worth $385,285 in the year. Anthropic declined to comment on the compensation data.
Amodei ranked above the chiefs at Alphabet and Amazon, but below their peers at Oracle and Nvidia. Sundar Pichai’s $10.9 million at Alphabet mostly went to an $8.8 million personal security bill; Andy Jassy’s $2.1 million at Amazon mostly went to travel and security.
Under the SEC’s compensation-actually-paid measure, which includes changes in unvested stock, Pichai’s compensation soared to $213.9 million in 2025 and Jassy’s to $13.2 million.
Oracle co-CEO Clayton Magouyrk led the pack at $627.5 million. In contrast, SpaceX paid Elon Musk $54,080 as a CEO before going public, and promised him super-voting shares if the company hits a $7.5 trillion valuation and gets 1 million people on Mars.
Amodei’s $18 million also lags behind the $22.8 million average for chief executives of S&P 500 companies, which the AFL-CIO says climbed 21% last year, not counting Musk’s $158 billion Tesla stock plan.
Courtney Yu, research director at compensation tracker Equilar, said $18 million sits on the low side for a $2 trillion company. Founder-CEOs rarely rely on annual pay since their equity holdings already take care of them, she said.
Amodei, with six other co-founders, may get a smaller piece of the IPO bounty than other tech chieftains, Yu said.
Amodei and the other co-founders also said in the filing that they would give away 80% of their own Anthropic shares to charity. Pressed on that promise, Anthropic pointed to an essay Amodei published earlier this year, in which he said the wealthy owe aid on problems AI creates and faulted a “cynical and nihilistic attitude” toward philanthropy among rich people in tech.
Risk factors make up about 80 pages of the 261-page prospectus, reported Cryptopolitan, including a warning that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” The company confidentially filed its draft S-1 on June 1, earlier, Cryptopolitan reports said.
In an interview with Fortune, Yann LeCun, a researcher in AI, this week called Amodei “deluded.”
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