Dario Amodei only has 1 direct report, his chief of staff—and everyone else reports to his sister: ‘It’s incredibly freeing’

Dario Amodei has built Anthropic, the company behind Claude, into one of the most successful startups in history—reaching a staggering $965 billion valuation and positioning the company for an IPO. And all this time, he’s been growing the business while managing just one person: his chief of staff. Every other senior leader at Anthropic reports to company president Daniela Amodei, his sister and cofounder. “It’s incredibly freeing,” Dario Amodei told Bloomberg. “It lets me do all the things that I do much more easily than I would otherwise.” Especially at the center of the high-stakes AI boom, the arrangement is unconventional—after all the average CEO manages around 10 people. However, Amodei insists he doesn’t do any less work than other bosses—or even his sister who manages the rest of the firm’s 2,000-plus workforce. “If you had to go through what I went through with DOW,” he listed as one example of the operational stressors he’s instead focused on, referring to the high-stakes negotiations with the Pentagon over AI safety. Dario Amodei isn’t the only direct-report outlier—Nvidia’s Jensen Huang embraces managing 60 people Anthropic’s leadership structure stands out even in Silicon Valley, where founders are known for experimenting with management styles, but he’s not the only outlier. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The semiconductor giant’s leader is known for overseeing roughly 60 direct reports, one of the widest spans of control among Fortune 500 CEOs. The leadership structure allows Huang to reach down into different layers of the organization. Rather than relying on traditional one-on-one meetings, he prefers bringing large groups of leaders together. As Huang told Fortune in 2024, executives should be able to learn from the feedback given to their peers and benefit from watching him work through challenges in real time. According to Eric Y. Lee, an assistant professor of mana