By Echo Wang, Ross Kerber and Isla Binnie
NEW YORK/BOSTON, October 6 (Reuters) - Dario Amodei made $18 million last year as CEO of Claude AI developer Anthropic, the company's IPO filing shows, putting him in the middle ranks of top executives at major technology firms in terms of compensation.
Anthropic is preparing for an IPO as early as this fall that could value it at more than $2 trillion, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters. Amodei's pay last year puts him above CEOs at Alphabet and
Amazon, but behind those at Oracle and Nvidia.
Amodei's pay leans heavily towards stock and other sorts of compensation, suggesting that like many other tech founders, his yearly salary will account for just a fraction of his wealth.
Dario Amodei and his sister, Anthropic President Daniela Amodei, each had their annual salaries doubled this past July to $1.4 million. Stock and options awards made up the bulk of their packages in 2025, with Daniela Amodei receiving a total of $16.4 million last year.
Anthropic's board this year granted the pair the promise of further equity in the form of restricted stock units, which promise a future payout if certain conditions are met. Some of that is tied to their remaining at the company, and some of it is tied to the IPO.
Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao earned $720,250 last year. He was granted options to buy 1.4 million shares when he was hired in 2024, and exercised options worth $385,285 in 2025.
An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on the figures.
MIDDLE OF THE PACK
The rise in US CEO pay in recent years has far outpaced the gains for the average worker, a dynamic critics worry could be exacerbated by AI's widespread adoption.
S&P 500 CEO average annual compensation rose 21% to $22.8 million last year, and that does not include the extraordinary case of Tesla's Elon Musk and his $158 billion restricted stock plan, according to the AFL-CIO.
Courtney Yu, director of research for executive compensation data firm Equilar, said Amodei's $18 million haul "seems on the lower end for a company valued at $2 trillion, but it will be interesting to see how that changes once the company goes public" and his full ownership stake is shown. With six other co-founders, Amodei may wind up getting a lesser share of the wealth created by the IPO compared with other major tech CEOs, Yu added.
Top executives at AI-focused tech firms earned amounts that varied widely in 2025, based on SEC filings. At the high end, Oracle co-CEO Clayton Magouyrk earned $627.5 million, while the lowest was the $54,080 paid to Musk as CEO of SpaceX, before it went public. SpaceX has also promised super-voting restricted shares to Musk, already the world's richest person, if the company's market value grows to $7.5 trillion and the firm puts 1 million people on Mars.
Other giant companies pay less on a year-by-year basis, with executives benefiting from enormous stock ownership while having only salary and security costs reflected in annual filings.
For instance, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai made $10.9 million in 2025, including $8.8 million for personal security "due to Sundar's significant public profile." By "compensation actually paid," Pichai earned $213.9 million last year, which among other things reflects the change in value of his unvested shares.
Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy made $2.1 million in 2025, a disclosure said, mainly reflecting travel and security. On an "actually paid" basis, Jassy received $13.2 million.
LIVING OFF THE STOCK
Equilar's Yu said the disclosures show how these executives don't need to worry about year-by-year pay.
"Founder CEOs typically own enough equity that when the company does well and the stock prices increases they can just live off the wealth of the equity they already own, and typically don't take in a lot in annual compensation," Yu said.
Anthropic said in the filing it offered a mix of salary, equity awards and other benefits. The S-1 statement seen by Reuters does not describe the founders' share of ownership in the company, which could be worth billions of dollars, depending on the final terms and valuation of the IPO.
The Amodei siblings and their fellow co-founders pledged in the IPO filing to dedicate 80% of their personal Anthropic equity to charitable causes.
Asked about the 80% figure Monday, an Anthropic spokesperson noted an essay Dario Amodei posted earlier this year, where he wrote that wealthy individuals have an obligation to help address problems stemming from AI adoption, and decried that many wealthy people, particularly in the tech industry, "have recently adopted a cynical and nihilistic attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless."
(Reporting by Echo Wang and Isla Binnie in New York and by Ross Kerber in Boston. Editing by Colin Barr and David Gaffen)
