Anthropic has filed confidentially for what could be the largest public offering in history. Yet, one of the most influential voices shaping its chief executive holds no official position at the company, appears in no regulatory filings, and has been quietly scrubbed from the internet. She also pitched a porn company to Jeffrey Epstein - less than two years after he got out of prison for sex trafficking minors.
Her name is Cami Clark, wife of CEO Dario Amodei. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation published Thursday, she has spent five years operating as a strategic adviser to the head of a company now seeking public capital at a valuation north of $2 trillion - all without a title, a salary, or formal disclosure.
Her marriage to Amodei has been scrubbed from Claude too... Ask Anthropic's own chatbot about Amodei's marital status, and Claude replies that it "doesn't seem to be clearly confirmed."
Someone actively worked to keep it that way. Amodei's Wikipedia page did not mention his marriage until this summer, and it still omits his wife's name. Google searches for his wife instead return photographs of his sister, Daniela Amodei, who co-runs the company. Citing its own analysis and a person familiar with the matter, the Journal reports that targeted efforts have been made to erase references to Clark online.
In 1999, at the age of 20, she married 64-year-old Reno architect Waldemar Eklof III, who had designed buildings including the city’s Atlantis Casino Resort. They divorced three years later. On a now-defunct personal website, Clark said she dropped out of architecture school in 1999.
...
Around 2010, she and Michelle Capocefalo started Eddice, which described itself as a “revolutionary porn company.” Named for Eddice Munson, Clark’s maternal grandmother, it aimed to emphasize sex positivity in a male-oriented porn industry, and carried the tagline: “intellectually promiscuous.” -WSJ
And she would pitch that company to Epstein...
The emails
What was scrubbed from the web is now partly a matter of federal record. Clark appears in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department.
On March 3, 2011, literary agent John Brockman - the man who spent years introducing Jeffrey Epstein to scientists and Silicon Valley executives - emailed Epstein from a Wired party where he was the guest of honor.
"You should connect for dinner with my girls - Cami and Michele - who I met last month in Munich," Brockman wrote. "They're in LA raising money for porn movie aimed at women's market." He included a link to their site, eddice.com.
Clark replied to Epstein directly that night, copying her business partner, Michelle Capocefalo.
"Hello Jeffrey! We would love to have dinner with you this evening. Does that work for you?" She included her cell number.
A year later, she circled back. Epstein didn't remember her.
"Cami Clark, John Brockman introduced us last year at Ted," she wrote on March 8, 2012. "We have the free luxury porn company. Does that ring a bell?"
"yes,, a loud gong," Epstein replied.
"Hahaha I was going to say, you would be the first person ever that didn't remember us," Clark answered.
Epstein wrote back that he was "in the caribeanc until april. as you recall i live here" - a reference to Little St. James - "but am willing to look at whatever you think viable."
She pitched him on investing. Per the Journal, he declined: "Can't do sex TV." Clark then pivoted to a second venture, a social dieting app for women. The correspondence ran for roughly two years, during which she invited him to a Manhattan housewarming party and connected with him on LinkedIn.
Jeffrey Epstein was released from custody in July 2009 after pleading guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution. Brockman's introduction came in March 2011 - twenty months later.
Epstein was a registered sex offender at the time, and his conviction was highly public. The Journal explicitly notes his status in its account of the exchange.
Sounding Board
Clark does not work at Anthropic, officially. According to people close to the company who spoke to the Journal, she functions as a sounding board and strategic adviser to Amodei. She sits in the front row at his public appearances and networks with investors at Davos and the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley. When Narendra Modi convened AI executives in New Delhi this year and restricted each to a single guest, Amodei brought his wife.
She also brought Anthropic one of its earliest and most consequential investors. Clark dated former Google CEO Eric Schmidt from 2011 to 2014, before she met Amodei. She introduced the two men, and Schmidt - by then investing in startups - participated in Anthropic's $124 million Series A in May 2021.
She later tried to convert that relationship into a formal position.
In February 2021, Clark pitched Schmidt on an investment vehicle called the Mother of AGI Fund. Per a 40-page proposal reviewed by the Journal, its stated purpose was to be "an elegant solution to formalize Cami's involvement in Anthropic (Dario's company), manage Eric's investment," and invest across the broader AGI ecosystem. Daniela Amodei and other co-founders opposed it, and the proposal went nowhere. Clark and Amodei married the following year.
More recently, Clark has been carrying the company's political water - telling political insiders that Anthropic's mission is to protect America and that the company is not as "woke" as critics claim. This pivot follows the Trump administration designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk after Amodei refused to lift restrictions on the Pentagon's use of Claude - a designation the company is currently challenging in court. At Sun Valley in July, she lunched with Ivanka Trump and spoke with Jared Kushner, whom Amodei had previously approached about investing.
What about the S-1?
While none of the above is illegal, Anthropic is no longer a private startup answerable only to a handful of venture funds willing to stomach idiosyncratic risk. It filed confidentially with the SEC on June 1 and is reportedly targeting an October listing. Investors told the Financial Times the valuation could exceed $2 trillion, which would make it the largest public offering ever conducted.
Registration statements require the disclosure of related-party arrangements and material influences on management. An unpaid, untitled adviser who introduced a lead investor, proposed a fund to formalize her stake, and carries corporate political messaging is precisely the kind of dynamic institutional buyers expect to see disclosed before they price a book.
So is the fact that someone - particularly someone who actively sought Jeffrey Epstein's involvement in a porn business after he was convicted for sex trafficking minors - has been made difficult to find. Anthropic's entire commercial premise relies on being trusted with a technology it readily admits is dangerous. That pitch justifies an enormous premium to enterprise customers and, soon, to public shareholders. It rests entirely on the proposition that the company is more careful, more transparent, and more institutionally sound than its competitors.