Early Life and Education
Jared Daniel Kaplan was born and raised in the Midwest, growing up as an identical twin. He received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University. His doctoral thesis was titled Aspects of holography.
Career
Kaplan's career began in theoretical physics. He was a postdoctoral fellow at SLAC and Stanford University. He became a professor at Johns Hopkins University in 2012, where he taught courses on deep learning, but is currently on leave to focus on AI work. Kaplan transitioned to artificial intelligence research, joining OpenAI in 2019 as a researcher. At OpenAI, he co-authored Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models and Language Models are Few-Shot Learners, which introduced GPT-3. He was also involved in the development of Codex.
Rise to Success
In 2021, Kaplan co-founded Anthropic, an AI research lab focused on AI safety and responsible development, along with six other ex-OpenAI employees. He currently serves as the Chief Science Officer. Anthropic has partnerships with Google's parent company Alphabet and Amazon. Kaplan's research on scaling laws has been influential in the AI industry. He also helped pioneer Constitutional AI. Anthropic's valuation was approximately $380 billion in February 2026.
Leadership and Philanthropy
Kaplan has a focus on creating a workplace where employees are excited and take pride in their work. He believes in autonomy and transparency. He is committed to being overly transparent with his team.