From a porn site to the arms of Jeffrey Epstein: The secret woman pulling the strings of the AI revolution
Cami Clark does not hold an official position at Anthropic, but is a key adviser to her husband, CEO Dario Amodei. Her ties to Silicon Valley elites, the venture dubbed a "revolutionary porn company," and correspondence with the late sex offender are now being revealed.
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited top AI industry executives to a prestigious meeting in New Delhi earlier this year, security protocols allowed each executive to bring only one companion. While most CEOs chose to bring colleagues from work, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, chose to bring his wife, Cami Clark. A Wall Street Journal investigation now reveals the enigmatic figure of Clark, who is emerging as one of the most powerful figures behind the scenes of the AI industry.
Although Clark is not officially employed at Anthropic, she is frequently spotted at high-profile events such as the World Economic Forum in Davos or chatting with investors at the Sun Valley conference. According to sources close to the company, she serves as a strategic adviser and confidante to Amodei. In addition, she was the one who brought one of the key investors to Anthropic in its early days in 2021: former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, with whom she previously had a romantic relationship.
Despite her significant influence, details about her are almost non-existent online. According to the Wall Street Journal report, active efforts have been made to erase mentions of her. The couple married in Italy in 2022, but until last summer, Amodei's Wikipedia page did not even mention that he was married. Even "Claude," Anthropic's AI chatbot, responds to queries on the subject by stating that "Dario Amodei's marital status is not clearly verified." Now, as Anthropic approaches a public offering that could exceed a $2 trillion valuation, it turns out that Clark is a dominant voice in steering the path of the CEO standing at the forefront of the technological revolution.
Meteoric rise, bankruptcy, and overtures to Jeffrey Epstein
Clark's life path, born in Reno, Nevada (1979), is far from routine. She never completed an academic degree, experienced a short marriage at age 20 to an architect more than 40 years her senior, and in the past even had to declare bankruptcy after her apartment in San Francisco was foreclosed on in 2007.
Around 2010, Clark and her partner, Michelle Capuchalo, founded "Addis," a company that defined itself as a "revolutionary porn company." The venture, aimed at women and boasting the slogan "Intellectually Promiscuous," tried to combine sexual content with intellectuals like Seth Godin. Documents recently released by the U.S. Department of Justice reveal how Clark tried to recruit investors for the company, among them none other than the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.
The acquaintance with Epstein was made in 2011 during a conference in Munich, through literary agent John Brockman. Email correspondence shows that Clark invited Epstein to dinner and later sent him scripts for "luxury porn films" under the title "American Girl in Paris." A year later, when she approached him again, Epstein replied: "I can't do sex TV." Clark did not give up and immediately suggested he invest in another venture, a social diet app for women. The connection between the two lasted about two years.
Architect of connections at the top of Silicon Valley
Clark's true power lies in her extraordinary ability to weave a network of connections. In 2014, she began dating Amodei, then a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. Beyond the connection she created between him and Eric Schmidt, work colleagues say that Clark was the one who introduced her close friend, Mira Murati (former CTO of OpenAI), to the company's founder, Greg Brockman.
When Amodei and his sister Daniela left OpenAI at the end of 2020 following tensions with Sam Altman, Clark worked to formalize her role in the new company. She even submitted a 40-page document to Schmidt for the establishment of an investment fund called "Mother of AGI Fund," but the proposal was rejected by the other founders, including Daniela Amodei.
Clark's involvement spills deep into politics. After Anthropic drew the ire of the Trump administration because Amodei refused to remove technological usage restrictions for the Pentagon, the company was classified as a "supply chain risk." Clark worked to repair the public damage ahead of the IPO: at the recent Sun Valley conference, she dined with her friend Ivanka Trump and spoke at length with Jared Kushner, trying to convince political figures that the company sees its mission as protecting America and is not operating out of a "woke" agenda.
