Mo Patel

Anthropic's leadership team on how they built a culture with no internal politics: In this conversation, Anthropic's co-founders and executives explain why the company works the way it does. It comes down to trust, low ego, and a single shared mission. President @DanielaAmodei explains the foundation: "I think Anthropic is really low politics... it's because of low ego. And I do think our interview process and just the type of people who work here... there's almost a like allergic reaction to politics." That low-politics environment produces something rare: genuine trust between teams. Co-founder @NotTomBrown describes the level of alignment inside the company: "Everybody was just like, 'Yes, obviously we're going to do this.'" He adds: "I do think that the trust thing is a special thing. That's extremely rare." Where does that culture come from? Co-founder Sam McCandlish points to leadership: "I credit Daniela with keeping the bar high. I credit the fact that we keep the reason the culture scaled." @jackclarkSF who leads policy, notes something simple but easy to overlook: "I think people say how nice people are here, which is actually a wildly important thing." CEO @DarioAmodei ties it all together with the principle that keeps every department pointed in the same direction: "Unity is so important. The idea that the product team, the research team, the trust and safety team, the go to market team, the policy team, the safety folks, they're all trying to contribute to kind of the same goal, the same mission of the company... I think it's dysfunctional when different parts of the company think they're trying to accomplish different things, think the company is about different things or think that other parts of the company are trying to undermine what they're doing." He continues: "The most important thing we've managed to preserve is... this idea that it's not, you know, there's some parts of the company causing damage and other parts of the company trying to repair it. But that there are different parts of the company doing different functions and they all function under a single theory of change."