Daniela Amodei at Stripe
Daniela Amodei spent five years at Stripe, from 2013 to 2018, joining when the payments company was small and leaving as it became one of the most valuable startups in the world. Back to the main Daniela Amodei profile.
Joining an early-stage Stripe
Daniela joined Stripe in 2013, coming from politics rather than engineering. Stripe was still a relatively small company at the time, which meant early employees took on broad responsibilities and grew with the company.
Risk, user policy and trust
Most of her time at Stripe was spent in risk: deciding which businesses Stripe would support, building the policies that governed users, and helping set up the infrastructure that caught fraud and abuse as payment volume grew. It is work that balances growth against harm, often with incomplete information.
User policy
Rules for what Stripe's platform could and could not be used for.
Risk operations
Teams and processes for catching fraud and abuse at scale.
Scaling
Hiring and building teams in a company growing very quickly.
What Stripe taught her
The parallels to AI are direct. A payments platform has to decide how its technology may be used, enforce that at scale and keep growing while doing it. At Anthropic, Daniela applies the same thinking to Claude: usage policies, trust and safety, and a business that grows without abandoning its safety commitments.
In 2018 she left Stripe to join OpenAI. Continue with Daniela Amodei at OpenAI.
Frequently asked questions
When did Daniela Amodei work at Stripe?
From 2013 to 2018, joining as an early employee.
What did Daniela Amodei do at Stripe?
She worked mainly in risk, overseeing user policy and risk infrastructure as the company scaled.
Why did Daniela Amodei leave Stripe?
She left in 2018 to join OpenAI and work on AI, where her brother Dario was already leading research.