• Dario and Daniela Amodei said trust is key to operating Anthropic with seven cofounders.
• Operating with honesty and in good faith makes it easier to disagree, Dario Amodei said.
• Anthropic's S-1 filing outlined how the cofounders will steer the company after it goes public.

Many people told Dario and Daniela Amodei that starting Anthropic with seven cofounders was a terrible idea.

Yet, more than five years later, the duo said that setup is crucial to their success. The siblings made the comments in an episode of the podcast The Builders, released on Tuesday and recorded in July.

"They all have equal stakes in the company, and they all carry the vision. We have inherent trust in all of them," Dario Amodei, the CEO, said.

He said later in the episode that mutual trust is crucial to resolving his frequent disagreements with other cofounders on high-stakes questions, like what safeguards to apply to a model and how to lobby for regulations.

"These are all good-faith disagreements, but they always get resolved because there's always trust that everyone is trying to get to the right answer and everyone is being honest," he said, drawing a contrast to what he said was his previous experience working at OpenAI.

Daniela Amodei, Anthropic's president, said the focus on honesty also extends to how the leaders communicate with employees.

"Honesty and integrity and how we treat each other and our employees is also reflective of how we want the technology to be built," she said.

The podcast was released one day after Anthropic released its S-1 paperwork as it prepares to go public. As Henry Chandonnet wrote for Business Insider, the paperwork was chock full of language about honesty being central to the company's public persona.

Under a unique governance structure, as outlined in the S-1, the company's seven founders will control 50.1% of all shareholder votes, meaning the seven cofounders will have more voting power than all other shareholders combined. In addition to their voting power, the cofounders also hold significant stakes in the company and stand to earn billions. Each of the cofounders has pledged to donate 80% of their personal equity in the company to philanthropy.

Anthropic's highly anticipated S-1 paperwork also revealed key financial statistics: The company had a net loss of $42 billion and revenue of $4.6 billion last year, five customers drove around a quarter of revenue in the first nine months of the year, and the Amodeis together had total compensation packages valued at around $35 million last year. More than 90 pages of the S-1 outline risk factors, and Anthropic warned that a "catastrophic AI-related incident" could overwhelm the entire insurance industry.

The AI behemoth is expected to target a $1.5 to $2 trillion valuation when it debuts on the Nasdaq in November, potentially making it the largest IPO ever. Some investing experts have expressed concern that the market may struggle to absorb another blockbuster IPO.

The maker of miracles may no longer be God, but it does rhyme with him. 

Anthropic, creator of Claude, filed its S-1 paperwork on Monday in preparation for a gargantuan initial public offering. The document runs over 300 pages and spans more than 240,000 words, some 50,000 more than the New Testament. It asks potential investors to prioritize mission over money: "Mission" appears 79 times, while "money" — the thing an S-1 is filed to generate, in this case, a bajillion dollars worth — a mere 17.

The company professes it could "bend the arc of geopolitical history toward freedom"; it could grow economies everywhere, including "the poorer parts of the world"; it could cure "diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia." Page 4 of the S-1 is not dissimilar from Jesus in Matthew 11: "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them."

Anthropic aims to "bring forth an age of miracles," it writes, and the investors who buy in should be true believers. Because in the wrong hands, as you'll see if you turn your missals to page 46, AI can be built in ways that pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."

While S-1s are definitionally visions of the future and full of hype, most are drab financial documents, eye-popping for their prospective profits more than their prose. But Anthropic didn't just open up its book; it wrote its own Good Book, a Bible-like statement of good and evil that joins a growing canon of the company's sacred texts. If you were to stumble onto any random page of this S-1, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were reading not a perfunctory government filing but the scripture of a doomsday religion.

Anthropic has long dodged allegations of fomenting a new, questionable faith. Headlines and takes on Anthropic's cultishness abound: "The Cult of Anthropic" (The Information), "Anthropic is a Cult and Claude is rapidly becoming its God" (The New York Post), "Has a cult ever started a company as successful as Anthropic?" (Peter "Beware the Antichrist" Thiel). Critics point to the employees' extinction predictions — p(doom) is not too far from p(rapture) — and ties to the effective altruism movement. It doesn't help that Dario Amodei was reportedly a Y2K prepper in high school. Anthropic has welcomed the reputation in other ways, inviting religious leaders to oversee the construction of Claude's rules.

In its S-1, Anthropic asks investors to take an actual leap of faith.

Let's play: Is that an Anthropic core value or one of God's 10 commandments?

Anthropic asks its employees to act for the "global good," be "helpful, honest, and harmless," and "hold light and shade." They shall have no other gods — as in, "put the mission first." And, just as followers must sublimate themselves to praise God, Anthropic employees must be "low-ego." The S-1 says it at least nine times.

To understand Anthropic, you'll need to understand 42 ornate terms. The S-1's glossary is sprawling, including neologisms for virtuous acts ("closing the loop") and evil deeds ("prompt injection"). Then there's "Constitutional AI," a type of large language model that is trained with goodness in mind. The SEC's "Plain English Handbook" implores companies to use "concrete, everyday words" and to avoid "relying on glossaries and defined terms." But can you truly be AGI-pilled if you don't speak of "interleaved thinking," "mechanistic interpretability," or "multi-agent orchestration"?

You use language like this because we need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work.James Bort

It's exceedingly hard to get a job at Anthropic, and not just because of the massive pool of cash-eyed engineers seeking IPO windfalls. The company has an intensive interview process, one it name-checks in the S-1. It looks for honesty, trust, and (you guessed it) a low ego. "We are willing to turn down candidates who don't demonstrate them, even if they are extremely strong technically," the S-1 reads. They must, in other words, be devotees through and through.

Accepted engineers become "Ants." Most tech companies have a name for their employees: Googlers, Metamates, Amazonians, Nvidians, Palantirians. Anthropic's moniker evokes the image of a collective, company as colony. In Proverbs 6:6, ants are considered diligent and prepared. Staffers may yell its teachings at their OpenAI foes: "Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!"

CEO Dario Amodei — Amodeity — leads the ants' march, along with his six apostles. These cofounders pull equal cash salaries and are "distinctly equipped to be stewards of our mission," the S-1 says. And, while the company opens itself to a broader group of believers through its forthcoming IPO, the divine cofounders will retain majority decision-making power.

Anthropic has its own form of tithing: The cofounders all made voluntary pledges of 80% of their personal equity to philanthropy. They incentivize their employees to do the same, promising to match donations.

Cult is an overused word, and many parts of Anthropic are far from cultish. Where cults are led by a liturgical leviathan that squashes the speech of their participants, Anthropic touts its culture of open dialogue. "Our teams operate in a truth-seeking environment where the best argument wins, not the loudest voice or the most senior title," the S-1 reads.

Americans' faith in the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the police, higher education, public education, news media, the medical system, and traditional organized religion are each at record- or near-record lows — and just as AI has brought on tremendous economic and social uncertainty. In that cauldron of doubt, tech founders — with their world-historic money, power, and ubiquity, and in their pursuit of it — sense an opportunity, to offer promise and purpose. As Sam Altman once said, "The most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion." They may also be trying to build devotion out of necessity, as the economy and stock market increasingly relies on AI gains.

"If these companies fail, what happens?" asked James Bort, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at DePaul University, and coauthor of a recent research paper on "cultic startups." "You use language like this because we need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work."

Anthropic didn't respond to my request to know more about how it wrote the S-1. So, we asked Claude: If the S-1 is a confession of faith, what are you? I am its product, Claude said. "The word made flesh, or at least made weights."