Jared Kaplan is a co-founder and the Chief Science Officer of Anthropic. A theoretical physicist by training, he is a co-author of the 2020 paper "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models" and is a central technical figure in Anthropic's research and safety strategy.
Background
Kaplan trained as a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins. He joined OpenAI in 2019 and co-founded Anthropic in 2021.
Research
Kaplan co-authored "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models" (2020), described in Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models, which established the power-law scaling relationships between model size, dataset size, compute, and loss that informed the frontier-AI industry's scaling approach. He is also a co-author of the Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback (InstructGPT).
Role at Anthropic
As Chief Science Officer, Kaplan holds overall research leadership at Anthropic. In a TechCrunch interview published June 6, 2025, "Inside Anthropic's AI ambitions with Jared Kaplan," he set out the company's research direction publicly. As a co-founder, co-author of the scaling-laws work, and scientific leader at one of the three frontier labs, Kaplan is among the more influential technical figures in AI, and is less publicly visible than Dario Amodei while remaining foundational to Anthropic's research strategy.
Relationships
- co-founded: Anthropic
- co-authored: Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models, Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback (InstructGPT) (co-author)
- related: Dario Amodei, Jack Clark, Chris Olah, Scaling Laws.