Jared Kaplan Co-founder and chief science officer, Anthropic; theoretical physicist and author of the neural scaling-laws paper Founder · Capital · $10B+ cost 3 headwinds 1

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Founder · Capital · Artificial Intelligence · Technology · Software · $10B+

Jared Kaplan

born Jared Daniel Kaplan

Co-founder and chief science officer, Anthropic; theoretical physicist and author of the neural scaling-laws paper · b. 1984 · United States (birthplace not established)

class not establishedhousehold not establishedplace not established

OpenAI Anthropic

Cost of failure 3 / 10

soft landingnothing to catch a fall

Headwinds 1 / 10

clear runagainst the current

Two calls made by hand, not formulas. how we score →

Summary

Kaplan spent about fifteen years as a theoretical physicist: Stanford, a Hertz-funded Harvard PhD, then a Johns Hopkins professorship from 2012.

He moved into machine learning at OpenAI in 2019, co-wrote the scaling-laws paper in 2020, and co-founded Anthropic in 2021. Forbes puts him at $15.5 billion, mostly a private stake. His family and childhood are undocumented.

Coded record

industryArtificial Intelligence · Technology · Software

talentexceptional

connectionswell-connected

outcome size$10B+ · band 6

path typeFounder · Capital

childhood householdtwo-parent

immigrant generationnone

educationgraduate degree

credential fundingscholarship

startup capitalangel

took outside investmentyes

kept ownershipyes

public scrutinyjournalistic

ⓘ Hover any row for its definition.

Profiled colleagues

People in this set who share a company with Jared Kaplan.

Mentioned in
Sam McCandlish

Subject cooperation: public-only · last reviewed 2026-10-19

Where they worked

OpenAI Researcher; contributor to GPT-3 and Codex · 2019 past Anthropic Co-founder and Chief Science Officer · 2021–now founder still there

How it happened

iPhysics first

Kaplan graduated from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in 2001, per the school, then earned a bachelor's in physics and mathematics at Stanford and a physics PhD at Harvard. Wikipedia gives his thesis as "Aspects of holography" (2009), advised by Nima Arkani-Hamed. The Hertz Foundation lists him as a 2005 Hertz Fellow. His parents, where he grew up, and what his upbringing cost or provided are not established in any source used, and the birth year here is inferred from Forbes giving his age as 42 in October 2026.

iiProfessor

Per Wikipedia he did postdoctoral work at SLAC and Stanford and has been a physics professor at Johns Hopkins since 2012. The university's page would not load for this review, so the title rests on the Simons Foundation, which lists him as an associate professor and a principal investigator on its Nonperturbative Bootstrap collaboration, and on Forbes, which says he is on leave. He received a 2015 National Science Foundation CAREER award, per the Hertz Foundation. His pay and the terms of his leave are not established.

iiiInto machine learning

Wikipedia says he joined OpenAI in 2019 as a researcher. The arXiv listing for "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models," submitted January 23, 2020, names him first among ten authors, with Dario Amodei last and Tom B. Brown fourth. The paper reports that model performance follows power laws in model size, data and compute. He is also the fifth of 31 authors on the GPT-3 paper, submitted in May 2020, and the Hertz Foundation says he helped build Codex.

ivAnthropic

Turning point

Anthropic was founded in January 2021, and Wikipedia's infobox lists Kaplan among eight founders, with seven former OpenAI employees named in the text, including Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. He is its chief science officer, and Wikipedia says that in October 2024 the company named him Responsible Scaling Officer. What set him apart from other physics professors was being first author on the paper that gave the company's main bet its evidence, and a group of senior colleagues who left OpenAI together to start a lab. His own account of the decision is not established in the sources used.

vWhere it landed

Forbes's profile page on October 18, 2026 shows $15.5 billion and a real-time rank of 181, lists him as self-made, and says private investors valued Anthropic at $965 billion in May 2026. Wikipedia carries an older $3.7 billion Forbes figure, so the number has moved a great deal. It is an estimate of a private stake, and how the co-founders' shares divide is not established.

viCompany disputes

Per Wikipedia, authors sued Anthropic in Bartz v. Anthropic over books used to train its models. A court held in June 2025 that training on digital copies was fair use but ordered trial over keeping pirated copies, and Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement, approved in July 2026. Music publishers sued in 2023 and again in August 2026, and the same article reports a 2026 dispute in which the Defense Department designated Anthropic a supply chain risk after the company refused to drop certain safeguards, a decision Anthropic said it would challenge. These concern the company. Kaplan is not described as personally named in the sources used.

Can you replicate their success?

Partly

The early steps are open to a small number of very strong students: a selective high school, a physics degree, a funded PhD and an academic post. The founding step is much narrower. It followed a move into machine learning at a leading lab, first authorship of a paper that became central to how the field plans its compute, colleagues who left together, and investors willing to fund very large training runs. Family background is not documented, so how much a safety net mattered is unknown.

Required conditions

1 Research ability at the level of a tenured physics professor, with enough job security to take a leave

2 A move into machine learning when scaling results were still being established

3 Senior colleagues willing to leave a lab and start a company together

4 Investors able to fund compute-heavy research at very large scale

The coded evidence

Thirteen groups, every claim sourced

Feeds cost of failure

Parent Occupations

Low

not established

Not established in any source used. The household value in the coded block is a placeholder because the enum has no unknown option.

↗ forbes.com

Parent Education

Low

not established

Not established.

↗ forbes.com

Structural context

founder lens · venture capital

The cost-of-failure score comes from this person's own money and circumstances. But who they were in America carried its own weight, the same way their household or income did, and it shaped how hard the path was just as much. That part isn't in the cost-of-failure number. It's here instead.

tailwindman

Men founded the companies that took nearly all the venture funding and almost every top outcome, a tailwind that never shows up in one person's own circumstances.

↗ techcrunch.com

Among the people recorded here — men: 225. Representation here is who reached these outcomes, not equal odds of reaching them.