Anthropic co-founder and President Daniela Amodei is bringing Mariano-Florentino "Tino" Cuellar into the company's leadership as its first chief global affairs officer. Anthropic said in its August 4 announcement that the former California Supreme Court justice will lead policy, strategic international engagement and government relationships worldwide.
The appointment adds an executive with experience in courts, government, academia and foreign policy to Anthropic's leadership team. Amodei, a literature graduate with a politics minor who co-founded Anthropic with her brother Dario, is moving Cuellar into management after he spent several months in Anthropic's governance structure.
Cuellar joined Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust in January 2026 and is stepping down from the independent body to join Anthropic. Anthropic said the Trust will select his successor through its normal process.
The transition gives Cuellar prior knowledge of Anthropic's governance while separating his former oversight position from his new management duties. Anthropic has not disclosed his precise start date, compensation or reporting structure.
From oversight to operations
Cuellar's move places him on the management side of Anthropic after several months in its governance structure. Anthropic's announcement says his responsibilities will cover policy, strategic international engagement and government relationships rather than Trust governance.
Anthropic cited Cuellar's experience across law, technology, international security and public institutions when describing the appointment. Cuellar said in the announcement that "democracies must set the terms" for how AI advances. Anthropic said Cuellar will work with heads of state, policy leaders, civil society and community groups as governments weigh AI's effects on economies, security and communities.
The remit covers several channels through which Anthropic encounters public institutions. Cuellar will direct Anthropic's policy work, manage strategic engagement outside the United States and build relationships with national governments. Anthropic also expects him to work with civil society and community organizations affected by the deployment of advanced AI.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic's co-founder and chief executive, has laid out positions that Cuellar's team may need to explain to policymakers. In a July 27 post, Amodei opposed a blanket ban on open-weights models. He also backed controls on powerful chip sales to China, measures against industrial-scale model distillation and mandatory safety testing for sufficiently capable open and closed models.
A career spanning courts, policy and AI
Cuellar served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 2021 until recently, according to Carnegie. Anthropic described his work there as spanning technology, international security and public institutions, including nuclear proliferation and frontier AI policy.
Before Carnegie, Cuellar served for nearly seven years on the Supreme Court of California, beginning in January 2015, according to his official court biography. His opinions addressed technology and privacy, international agreements and the separation of powers, Anthropic said.
Cuellar was born in Matamoros, Mexico, moved to California at 14 and became a naturalized US citizen at 21, according to Stanford's account of his career. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard, a law degree from Yale and a doctorate in political science from Stanford.
At Stanford, Cuellar directed the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, co-directed the Center for International Security and Cooperation and led the Stanford Cyber Initiative. He also worked in the White House and federal agencies during three presidential administrations. His advisory roles included the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board and the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Responsible Computing Research.
Cuellar also co-led California's Frontier AI Working Group and began organizing university classes on artificial intelligence nearly a decade ago, according to Anthropic. The working group published its final report on June 17, 2025, according to the group's official site. Cuellar currently holds a professorship at Stanford Law School and serves as a senior fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Anthropic staffs policy for a much larger company
The appointment follows a sharp expansion in Anthropic's financing and reported commercial activity. The San Francisco-based company competes with OpenAI, Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama, Cohere, xAI's Grok and Mistral AI across assistants, coding products, agents and application programming interfaces.
Anthropic said its February 2026 Series G raised $30 billion at a $380 billion post-money valuation. GIC and Coatue led that round. At the time, Anthropic said more than 500 customers were spending at least $1 million annually and eight of the Fortune 10 used Claude.
Three months later, Anthropic announced a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation. Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital led the May round. Anthropic said run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion, up from $14 billion in February, while Claude Code had exceeded $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue. Those are company-reported figures rather than audited financial results.
Anthropic sells access to Claude through its own products and major cloud platforms. Its offerings include consumer and professional Claude plans, enterprise services, an API and Claude Code, an agent that can work with codebases and software repositories. That customer and distribution footprint gives Cuellar's office a concrete set of government relationships to manage as countries determine how advanced AI products can be sold and used.
Daniela Amodei described Cuellar in Anthropic's announcement as a pragmatic partner for governments, civil society and community groups. His initial priorities remain undisclosed, but the job's scope is explicit: one executive will oversee policy, international engagement and government relationships across the markets where Anthropic operates. His departure from the Trust separates the independent governance body from the management team representing Anthropic to public officials.