Anthropic cofounder used stuffed animals as an advisory council for management role-playing
firstadopter · x · 2026-10-01
A new Atlantic piece on the Anthropic-OpenAI feud reveals an unusual management ritual: Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei and Karnofsky kept a large collection of stuffed animals as a personal advisory council for managerial role-playing, each with an assigned character profile. Jinji the lazy cat encouraged her to cancel meetings and avoid overcommitting; Maura the pink bear was a detail-oriented type-A manager; Beary Bonds the panda was the 'patron bear of generosity and empathy.' She treated the exercises as somewhere between an inside joke and earnest technique, saying in 2023 they were 'very useful in analyzing different personality types.' Few at OpenAI knew about the animals, and those who did weren't sure how seriously she took their advice.
Related event: Anthropic Co-founder Uses Stuffed Animals as Advisory Board(2 posts)→
More from Companies & People
- Recruiters now use Codex/Claude to find candidates — time to run AEO on yourself — kleffew94 · 2026-10-01
- Google exec on productivity addiction: AI is accelerating burnout of top talent — rseroter · 2026-10-01
- Town founder: multiplayer is the moat for AI assistants — agents that ask each other for answers — annetgriffin · 2026-10-01
- Runway CEO teases: the show is about to start — c_valenzuelab · 2026-10-01
- Stanford HAI Launches Weekly Fall AI for Science Seminar Series, Open to the Public — StanfordHAI · 2026-10-01
- PyTorch Conference 2026 guide highlights Ray sessions from Databricks, Google, Uber — PyTorch · 2026-10-01