#187

Sam McCandlish

United States 36 years old Self-Made

Overview

Source of Wealth
Artificial intelligence
Industry
Technology
Residence
San Francisco, California

Biography

Sam McCandlish is cofounder and chief technology officer of Anthropic, which builds large-scale artificial intelligence systems.

He cofounded Anthropic in 2021 with six other ex-OpenAI employees.

Anthropic, which private investors valued at $380 billion in February 2026, has partnerships with Google's parent company Alphabet and Amazon.

McCandlish previously worked for three years as a member of the technical staff at OpenAI.

He has a PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford.