Clark, the mysterious woman behind the $13 trillion IPO
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited global AI leaders to meet in New Delhi earlier this year, each executive was only allowed to carry one entourage. Most people brought colleagues, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei brought his wife Cami Clark.
Clark doesn't have any official position at Anthropic, yet he almost never misses her husband's important occasions — whether it's a front row seat at the Davos Forum or an Allen & Co. investor party in Sun Valley.
According to people familiar with the matter, she is Amodei's most important strategic advisor and emotional pillar, while also managing the family's personal investment strategies and assisting in screening external investment invitations.
More importantly, it was she who brought former Google CEO Eric Schmidt into Anthropic's early investor camp, laying an important foundation for the company's start.
Clark's existence is under unprecedented scrutiny, as soon as Anthropic hit an IPO worth over 2 trillion US dollars (about 13.49 trillion yuan) this fall.
The Wall Street Journal and The Information have recently released in-depth reports to restore the twists and turns of the “First Lady of Anthropic” from a Reno blue-collar family to the core of the world's hottest AI company — including a little-known past: she tried to raise funds from registered sex offender Epstein to seek investment in her adult film company.
A deliberately stealth “shadow advisor”
There is an astonishing gap between Clark's influence and online presence.
According to Wall Street Journal analysis and a source familiar with the matter, information about Clark on the Internet is extremely scarce, and some people have taken the initiative to delete related records.
Her personal website has gone offline, her LinkedIn homepage has disappeared, and Instagram has stopped being updated. Amodei's Wikipedia page did not state that she was married until this summer, and she hasn't listed her wife's name yet.
When I Google “Dario Amodei's wife,” a picture of her sister, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei, often pops up.
Even Anthropic's own AI chatbot, Claude, can only answer when asked about related questions: “Dario Amodei's marital status doesn't seem to have been clearly confirmed.”
However, in the real world, Clark's presence is quite different. She accompanied her husband to high-profile events such as Davos, New Delhi, and Sun Valley, and made up for Amodei's lack of restrained personality with her outgoing social style.
According to people familiar with the matter, she will take the initiative to discuss with politicians and potential investors before introducing them to her husband. At the Sun Valley conference in July of this year, she had lunch with Ivanka Trump and chatted with Jared Kushner — previously Amodei had approached Kushner to seek investment.
A person who met the couple said that even though the two have been together for over ten years, when they saw them recently at an event, they “felt as close as a newlywed couple”.
From Reno to Silicon Valley: A Winding Path to Entrepreneurship
Clark was born in Reno, Nevada in 1979 and grew up in a blue-collar family. According to a person familiar with her, she began working part-time at the plumber's union with her grandmother and aunt when she was 14 years old.
After high school, she went to the San Francisco Bay Area to study architecture at the California Institute of the Arts, then worked in business development at high-end office furniture company Herman Miller, thus gaining her first window into the technology industry.
In 1999, Clark, who was only 20, married 64-year-old Reno architect Waldemar Eklof III, and divorced three years later. Since then, she has traveled between San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. Her San Francisco apartment was foreclosed by the bank in 2007 and filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
However, she never stopped trying to start a business. Around 2009, Clark and Michelle Capocefalo co-founded Eddice, an adult film company targeting women. The slogan was “intellectually promiscuous” (intellectually indulgent), with the intention of transforming an industry that has long been dominated by men with high production standards and a female perspective.
Eddice's path to financing has been difficult. Many investors shied away from adult content, and Clark and Capocefalo had to look for funding.
In 2011, they met Epstein through literary agent John Brockman. According to Epstein documents released by the Department of Justice, Brockman explained to Epstein in an email: “You should have dinner with my friends Cami and Michelle, who are in Los Angeles to raise money for an adult film aimed at the female market.”
Clark then took the initiative to contact Epstein and sent the script for the film, adding “We think you and the ladies might like it; it's a bit inappropriate to watch at work”. She followed up a year later and asked if Epstein would be interested in participating in a new round of funding. Epstein declined on the grounds that he “cannot do sex-related television.”
Clark then turned to him for another project—a “social dieting app” for women. The pair's correspondence continued for about two years, and Clark also invited Epstein to her housewarming party in Lower East Manhattan and connected with him on LinkedIn.
According to The Information, a friend who knew Clark at the time said that Brockman did not provide any information about Epstein's background at the time of the introduction.
Eddice ended up raising only hundreds of thousands of dollars, far below expectations, and the website stopped being updated around 2013.
A critical step: Bringing Schmidt into Amodei's world
After Eddice's failure, Clark quickly moved on to the next project.
In 2013, she founded Female Algorithm Technologies and plans to open high-end women-centered health clinics in Los Angeles and New York. The annual fee starts at $9,000 and can reach up to 20,000 US dollars.
She brought Schmidt's investment into the company and listed an advisor as “Dr. Dario Amodei” — it was during this period that she met Amodei and began a relationship the following year. According to The Information, the two formed a deep connection due to their shared interest in the application of AI in the medical field.
Female Algorithm Technologies ultimately failed to be implemented. Clark joined virtual reality gesture control company Leap Motion as the head of revenue in 2016, where he met Mira Murati, who later became OpenAI's chief technology officer.
Meanwhile, Clark is quietly paving the way for Amodei's future. While Amodei was still working at OpenAI, Clark began sending his research papers to tech billionaires capable of investing in their future companies, according to a source familiar with the matter.
At the end of 2020, the conflict between Amodei and OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman intensified, and he left with his sister Daniela and five other employees to found Anthropic.
Clark immediately set out to find financial support for the new company. One of the most important steps was to refer her predecessor, Schmidt, who had retired from Google to become a tech investor at the time, to Amodei.
Schmidt has stated that when he visited Amodei and Clark's San Francisco apartment in 2018, he was impressed by the young scientist's ideas. In May 2021, Anthropic announced the completion of Series A financing of US$124 million. Schmidt is one of the investors.
The “Mother of AGI” Fund: An Unfinished Plan
Clark isn't content to just be a referrer.
According to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, in February 2021, she submitted a 40-page proposal to Schmidt to co-establish a venture capital fund called “Mother of AGI Fund” (AGI's parent fund). The goal is to “formalize Cami's participation in Anthropic and manage Eric's investments” and invest in the entire AGI ecosystem, hoping to raise billions of dollars.
However, the plan was boycotted from within Anthropic. According to people familiar with the matter, Daniela Amodei and other co-founders objected to moving forward with the plan, citing Clark's personal relationship with Amodei. Schmidt ultimately chose to invest directly in Anthropic rather than through Clark's fund.
This episode reflects the subtlety of Clark's internal situation at Anthropic: her influence is real, yet it always remains outside of the formal structure.
Political PR on the eve of the IPO
As Anthropic sprinted towards an IPO, Clark's role also quietly extended to the political level.
Earlier this year, Anthropic clashed head-on with the Trump administration over Amodei's refusal to lift restrictions on Claude's use of the Pentagon. The government listed Anthropic as a supply chain risk, and Pentagon partners were actually banned from using their technology in Department of Defense related work, and the company has already filed a lawsuit.
According to people familiar with the matter, Clark recently took the initiative to send messages to politicians, saying that Anthropic sees the protection of American interests as its mission and is not an “awakening” as external critics think.
She formed a private friendship with Ivanka Trump and joined a WhatsApp group called “Real Housewives of AI”, which included many well-known women in the tech industry. A person close to Amodei described Clark as his “stabilizing force.”
At a time when Anthropic is about to enter the most important moment in its history, this woman, who has never appeared on the company's organizational chart, is probably influencing the direction of the company in a way that is difficult to quantify but ubiquitous.
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