Dear Readers,

Dario Amodei is no longer a quiet physicist who helped scale GPT-3. Now he’s leading a $380 billion player that claims AI could push white-collar unemployment toward 20%. In today’s issue you’ll see why that tension between genius and disruption is defining the game in 2026.

We’ll begin with the rise of Anthropic, from OpenAI spin-out to enterprise AI powerhouse, taking a look at it’s $14B run rate and how Claude Code emerging as the daily copilot for developers. Then we’ll zoom out to look at the main battlefield: gigawatt data centers, institutional trust, and the struggle to transform scaling laws into lasting influence. Along the way, we will unpack Amodei’s journey from biophysics to building what he calls a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” We’ll then look at the strategic break with OpenAI, and why Anthropic’s model cadence is starting to feel less like product launches and more like structural shifts in how knowledge work happens.

If AI is becoming infrastructure rather than interface, this is the moment where strategy, governance, and power collide- so let’s dive in.

All the best,

Kim Isenberg

“The years in front of us will be impossibly hard, asking more of us than we think we can give. But in my time as a researcher, leader, and citizen, I have seen enough courage and nobility to believe that we can win—that when put in the darkest circumstances, humanity has a way of gathering, seemingly at the last minute, the strength and wisdom needed to prevail. We have no time to lose.”

— Dario Amodei, The Adolescence of Technology

By early 2026, the AI race will have ceased to be an abstract Silicon Valley talking point. It's become something you can touch, and that touches you: massive data centers, purpose-built chips, energy deals counted in gigawatts. But the actual fight between the companies and products isn't just about who can stockpile the most GPUs. It's about who can turn all that brute-force scaling into lasting influence, without losing the public's trust along the way.

“Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years. The country needs to build new data centers quickly to maintain its competitiveness on AI and national security—but AI companies shouldn’t leave American ratepayers to pick up the tab.”

— Anthropic

Few people embody that tension as vividly as Amodei, Athroopic CEO and co-founder. In one of his most quoted lines, he describes the object we’re building as “a country of geniuses in a datacenter.” his vision of superintelligence. The phrase lands because it’s equal parts awe and warning: if you really are creating something like a new cognitive superpower, you don’t get to treat governance as an afterthought! You don’t get to shrug and say, “Move fast.” You either design the institutions that can handle the power, or you gamble that the market will do it for you.

Amodei’s story is interesting precisely because he didn’t arrive here through the typical CEO career path. He came to it through physics and biophysics, crossed from there over into industrial machine learning, then helped define (and accelerate) the scaling era at OpenAI, before leaving to build a rival lab that tries to make safety and governance a competitive advantage rather than a PR initiative.

This raises a sharper debate than “Who has the better model?” A much more consequential question is: How did a scientist obsessed with scaling and safety become the leader of a company trying to out-institutionalize OpenAI, and is that strategy actually working? This is the story of Dario Amodei - genius behind Anthropic - and how he has built his company.