It's in the Wall Street Journal.
This isn't a rumor.
“His clique at OpenAI became known as ‘the pandas.’”
— @WSJ
Dario is Professor Panda 🐼
They called them
the Pandas first.
The team that founded Anthropic had a nickname at OpenAI: the pandas. 🐼
Professor Panda · Now live on Solana · Launched on pump.fun
THE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDATHE FOUNDERS OF ANTHROPIC WERE CALLED THE PANDAS$PANDA
THE LORE
- 🐼 The WSJ and Big Technology both reported it.
- 🐼 Dario Amodei wore a giant panda head to his sister's wedding.
- 🐼 His own employees call him Professor Panda.
- 🐼 Last month SNL sent China's new pandas to Anthropic's lab.
- 🐼 Anthropic's own code has five switches named after pandas.
Why it matters: the company the pandas built was valued near $965B in May and just filed to go public. Dario is its CEO. His sister Daniela, whose wedding he walked down the aisle at in a panda head, is its president.
One of the biggest IPOs ever has a mascot, and nobody has claimed it yet.
“Professor Panda”
THE RECEIPTS
Everyone told the same story.
Alex Kantrowitz interviewed more than two dozen of Dario's colleagues, friends and critics. They told the same story. Dario had a tight-knit group around him.
“which some called ‘the pandas,’ due to his love of the animal”
— @Kantrowitz
The panda headSilly formal. He took it seriously.
At Daniela's wedding, the dress code was silly formal. Her brother took it seriously. The panda is his favorite animal.
“Dario wore a giant panda head down the aisle”
— @sfstandard
Professor PandaAt Anthropic, he's still one.
At OpenAI, his crew were the pandas. His Slack profile picture? Dario smiling with a stuffed panda.
“known to some of his employees as Professor Panda”
— @WSJ
HOW IT HAPPENED 👇
2016
Dario and Daniela share a group house on Delano Avenue in San Francisco. Greg Brockman of OpenAI is always around. By mid-2016, Dario has joined OpenAI.
2017
Daniela marries Holden Karnofsky, with her brother in the panda head.
2016–2020
At OpenAI, Dario rises to VP of research and leads the work behind GPT-2 and GPT-3. The people closest to him form a tight crew with their own ideas about how AI should be built. The rest of the building starts calling them the pandas.
Dec 2020
The pandas leave. Dario, Daniela and nearly a dozen others walk out of OpenAI.
2021
They found Anthropic.
Family
Daniela and Holden kept a council of stuffed animals for management role-play, each with its own personality. The panda, Beary Bonds, was the “patron bear of generosity and empathy.” (The Atlantic)
Sept 12, 2026
Dario publishes an essay calling for chip limits on China. Beijing's Foreign Ministry hits back, and state media calls it a “Cold War playbook.”
Sept 24, 2026
Xi Jinping lands at the White House with a gift for America: two giant pandas. The same day, an Anthropic staffer posts about it and goes viral: “You're getting those pandas and you'll like it.” (@rSanti97)
Sept 26, 2026
SNL's Weekend Update jokes that Xi's pandas are headed to Anthropic's research lab.
Sept 27, 2026
Ping Ping and Fu Shuang land in Atlanta on a FedEx “Panda Express” 777. China's answer to the AI lab most hawkish on China? Send it pandas.
THE PANDAS ARE IN THE CODE 🐼
Claude Code is Anthropic's own AI coding tool. Dig into the program and you'll find five switches named after pandas. The docs never mention them.
$ claude --version
tengu_moonlit_panda
tengu_steady_panda
tengu_velvet_panda
tengu_playful_panda
tengu_golden_panda
They aren't decorations. They're live feature flags wired into real systems: git safety checks, file handling, even how Claude decides when to wait before it answers.
At least three were switched on when we looked.
Moonlit. Steady. Velvet. Playful. Golden.
Nobody's said why.
Even its random name generator has a panda on the list. It can name your work golden-dreaming-panda.
Don't trust us. Check it yourself:
grep -aoE 'tengu_[a-z]+_panda' "$(readlink -f "$(which claude)")" | sort -uThe pandas came home.
The founder never picked the name. The crowd gave it to them, and it stuck. Now it's in the code.
That's how every great meme works.
$PANDA. Not a name we gave ourselves. 🐼
FIND $PANDA HERE
THE NUMBERS
Fair launched on pump.fun · Solana
Paired
With Anthropic Tokenized pre-stock
1B
Total supply
0/0
Buy / sell tax
0%
Team allocation · No presale
pump.fun
Fair launch
Revoked
Mint & freeze authority
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