The Plush ‘Board of Directors’: Anthropic Co-Founder Used Stuffed Animals to Navigate Workplace Conflicts

Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei and her husband, Holden Karnofsky, used stuffed animals as a kind of “advisory board” to help them navigate workplace conflicts and management challenges. Each toy was given a name, a distinct personality and its own management style.

The unusual practice is detailed in a story by The Atlantic, based on journalist Kevin Roose’s forthcoming book, The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence.

The practice began before Anthropic was founded, when Amodei and Karnofsky were working at OpenAI. In essence, the couple created their own “personal board of directors” made up of stuffed animals and used them for a kind of management role-playing exercise.

Each toy had its own personality. Gingy, for example, was described as a “lazy cat” who would advise Daniela to cancel meetings and avoid taking on too much work.

Maura, a pink bear, was the complete opposite: an “A-type manager focused on details.”

And a panda named Beary Bonds was given the title of “chief bear of generosity and empathy” — perhaps a playful reference to the couple’s ties to the controversial effective altruism movement.

For Amodei, the exercise appears to have been more than just a bit of fun. The plush advisory board helped her analyze different personality types and look at workplace situations from multiple perspectives.

“They’re really useful for analyzing different personality types,” Amodei told journalist Kevin Roose in 2023.

Not everyone at OpenAI knew about the unusual “advisory board.” And even those who did were not always aware of just how seriously Amodei took the advice of her plush advisers.

Today, Daniela Amodei serves as president of Anthropic and chair of its board of directors. She oversees a broad range of areas, including research, development, products, corporate governance and commercial operations.

Her unusual “advisory board” of stuffed animals, meanwhile, remains one of the more eccentric details in the story of how the company was created — a company that is now at the center of the global race to develop advanced artificial intelligence.