Anthropic spent $2.75m guarding Dario Amodei, four times his salary
Anthropic spent $2.75 million protecting cofounder and chief executive Dario Amodei in 2025, more than four times his $654,167 base salary, according to the artificial intelligence company's newly public IPO filing. The bill took more than 15% of his $17.96 million in total reported compensation, which also included stock and option awards.
The spending did not stop with the chief executive. Anthropic paid a further $1.29 million for personal protection, home security and transport for his sister, president and cofounder Daniela Amodei, plus $97,055 on private-aircraft travel for Dario that the company said his security programme required. The board determined in 2025 that enhanced protection for the Amodeis and their families was necessary, citing security studies, increased media attention and what it called bona fide business-related, heightened security concerns. Measures included personal protection, home surveillance and private cars with drivers.
The filing acknowledges the pressure behind those costs. "Heightened public attention on AI has increased physical and informational security risks," Anthropic wrote, "and we have experienced threats to employee safety and attempts to obtain confidential information through physical or digital means." It does not say when the threats occurred. Token Times could not establish from the filing whether security spending rose in 2025, because Anthropic did not disclose its 2024 figure.
Some threats have since become public. In April, days after an attack on OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman's home, a man entered the lobby of Anthropic's San Francisco office behind a badge-swiping employee and told a guard that a top executive was "going to be killed", according to the filing's account as previously reported. That month a man who had applied for a job under a false identity allegedly posted threats to harm employees' children; police classified it as a terroristic threat and made no arrest. In June a customer demanding a refund wrote that he would come to the office with his pistol. In August, Amodei was named in an alleged threat: a Claude user claimed in a chat to have bought an AR-15 rifle and to have the chief executive "in his sights", according to a police report. Anthropic reported the chat, banned the account, and the man later told a local outlet he had been joking.
Against other technology giants, the sum is modest. Meta disclosed about $22.5 million in direct security costs for Mark Zuckerberg in 2025, or $25.1 million including private-aircraft costs; Alphabet reported $8.8 million for Sundar Pichai and Nvidia nearly $4 million for Jensen Huang. Against corporate America at large the gap runs the other way: ISS-Corporate told Fortune that the median reported chief executive security cost was $93,818 among S&P 500 companies and $401,336 among software and services companies, making Amodei's protection nearly seven times the latter. Anthropic has since extended security to chief financial officer Krishna Rao in 2026 and commissioned an independent assessment of the risks he faces, without disclosing the cost.
