Dario Amodei only has 1 direct report, his chief of staff—and everyone else reports to his sister: ‘It’s incredibly freeing’

As $965 billion Anthropic prepares to IPO, the AI firm’s CEO Dario Amodei admits he’s only been managing one person—and passing the rest to his sister.

Dario Amodei has built Anthropic, the company behind Claude, into one of the most successful startups in history—reaching a staggering $965 billion valuation and positioning the company for an IPO.

And all this time, he’s been growing the business while managing just one person: his chief of staff. Every other senior leader at Anthropic reports to company president Daniela Amodei, his sister and cofounder.

“It’s incredibly freeing,” Dario Amodei told Bloomberg. “It lets me do all the things that I do much more easily than I would otherwise.”

Especially at the center of the high-stakes AI boom, the arrangement is unconventional—after all the average CEO manages around 10 people. However, Amodei insists he doesn’t do any less work than other bosses—or even his sister who manages the rest of the firm’s 2,000-plus workforce. 

“If you had to go through what I went through with DOW,” he listed as one example of the operational stressors he’s instead focused on, referring to the high-stakes negotiations with the Pentagon over AI safety.

Dario Amodei isn’t the only direct-report outlier—Nvidia’s Jensen Huang embraces managing 60 people

Anthropic’s leadership structure stands out even in Silicon Valley, where founders are known for experimenting with management styles, but he’s not the only outlier. 

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The semiconductor giant’s leader is known for overseeing roughly 60 direct reports, one of the widest spans of control among Fortune 500 CEOs.

The leadership structure allows Huang to reach down into different layers of the organization. Rather than relying on traditional one-on-one meetings, he prefers bringing large groups of leaders together. As Huang told Fortune in 2024, executives should be able to learn from the feedback given to their peers and benefit from watching him work through challenges in real time.

According to Eric Y. Lee, an assistant professor of management at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School, the ideal number of direct reports often depends on a company’s size and complexity. 

“I would gather that Anthropic has less complexity in its top management team structure, with fewer roles, levels, and areas of expertise, whereas Nvidia has more,” Lee told Fortune by email.  “That would mean a firm like Nvidia simply needs more direct reports to account for that complexity, whereas Anthropic can get away with just one.”

At the end of 2025, Anthropic had 2,300 employees—as compared to Nvidia’s 42,000.

Management experts say both approaches come with tradeoffs. A wider span of control can reduce bureaucracy, speed communication, and help leaders stay close to the business. But it can also overwhelm executives and create perceptions of micromanagement. Narrower structures free CEOs to focus on strategy and external relationships, but they require significant trust in the leaders managing beneath them.

Striking the right management balance is an age-old question being disrupted by AI—and Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg are at opposite ends

The debate over the ideal management structure is nearly as old as management itself. But the rise of AI has added new urgency to the conversation, pushing companies to rethink how many people managers oversee and how decisions get made.

The average American manager now supervises 12 direct reports, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and some workplace experts argue AI is accelerating that trend by allowing leaders to oversee larger teams with fewer layers of bureaucracy.

Few CEOs have embraced that philosophy more openly than JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon. In his annual shareholder letter earlier this year, the banking giant’s longtime chief executive argued that companies should organize around small, empowered teams capable of moving quickly and independently.

“The teams needed to tackle [specific problems] should be small and authorized with the decision-making ability to move and act like Navy SEALs or the Army’s Delta Force,” he wrote. “This is trench warfare; it’s about fighting for every inch, moving quickly, and getting things done.”

Special operations units, Dimon said, are intentionally small to maximize accountability, agility, and execution. Businesses can benefit from the same principle: when teams are lean, every employee has a clear stake in the outcome. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken a different approach. The 42-year-old reportedly manages a “core army” of 25-30 employees, and has pushed for broader structures across the company. Meta’s newly formed applied AI engineering organization reportedly adopted a manager-to-employee ratio of roughly 1-to-50.

“I think if you’re going to report to me, you need to be able to manage yourself,” Zuckerberg said last year, adding that he didn’t do one-to-one meetings with the people who report to him. “But I believe that for the rest of the company, management is kind of important and it’s an important way that people grow.”

For leaders trying to navigate the AI era, the difference in management structures among some of the most successful companies indicate that while there is no magic number when it comes to direct reports, the willingness to consider new ideas is paramount.

“The best leaders stay mindful of the evolving demands of their job and continually tweak their team as they go,” the HBS report authors said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com