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Anthropic PBC is an American
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
(AI)
startup A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to ...
company founded in 2021. Anthropic has developed a family of
large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...
s (LLMs) named
Claude Claude may refer to: People and fictional characters * Claude (given name), a list of people and fictional characters * Claude (surname), a list of people * Claude Callegari (1962–2021), English Arsenal supporter * Claude Debussy (1862–1918), ...
as a competitor to
OpenAI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...
's
ChatGPT ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released on November 30, 2022. It uses large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o as well as other Multimodal learning, multimodal models to create human-like re ...
and
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
's
Gemini Gemini most often refers to: * Gemini (constellation), one of the constellations of the zodiac * Gemini (astrology), an astrological sign Gemini may also refer to: Science and technology Space * Gemini in Chinese astronomy, the Gemini constellat ...
. According to the company, it researches and develops AI to "study their safety properties at the technological frontier" and use this research to deploy safe models for the public. Anthropic was founded by former members of OpenAI, including siblings
Daniela Amodei Daniela Amodei (born ) is an American AI entrepreneur. She is the President and co-founder of the AI company Anthropic. Early life and education Her father, Riccardo Amodei, was a leather craftsman born in Italy. Her mother, Elena Engel, a Jew ...
and
Dario Amodei Dario Amodei (born 1983) is an American artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the large language model series Claude. He was previously the vice president of research ...
. In September 2023,
Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...
announced an investment of up to $4 billion, followed by a $2 billion commitment from Google in the following month.


History


Founding and early development (2021–2022)

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former employees of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, the latter of whom served as OpenAI's Vice President of Research. In April 2022, Anthropic announced it had received $580 million in funding, including a $500 million investment from
FTX FTX Trading Ltd., trading as FTX (Futures Exchange), is a bankrupt company that formerly operated a cryptocurrency exchange and crypto hedge fund. The exchange was founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang and collapsed in 2022 after ...
under the leadership of
Sam Bankman-Fried Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried (born March 5, 1992), commonly known as SBF, is an American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in November 2023. Bankman-Fried founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and was celebrated as a ...
. In the summer of 2022, Anthropic finished training the first version of Claude but did not release it, mentioning the need for further internal safety testing and the desire to avoid initiating a potentially hazardous race to develop increasingly powerful AI systems.


Legal and strategic partnerships (2023)

In February 2023, Anthropic was sued by Texas-based Anthrop LLC for the use of its registered trademark "Anthropic A.I." On September 25, 2023, Amazon announced a partnership with Anthropic, with Amazon becoming a minority
stakeholder Stakeholder may refer to: *Stakeholder (corporate), a group, corporate, organization, member, or system that affects or can be affected by an organization's actions *Project stakeholder, a person, group, or organization with an interest in a proje ...
by initially investing $1.25 billion, and planning a total investment of $4 billion. As part of the deal, Anthropic would use
Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...
(AWS) as its primary cloud provider and make its AI models available to AWS customers. The next month, Google invested $500 million in Anthropic, and committed to an additional $1.5 billion over time.


Major investments and acquisitions (2024)

In March 2024, Amazon maxed out its potential investment from the agreement made in the prior year by investing another US$2.75 billion into Anthropic, completing its $4 billion investment. In November 2024, Amazon announced a new investment of $4 billion in Anthropic (bringing its total investment to $8 billion), including an agreement to increase the use of Amazon's AI chips for training and running Anthropic's large language models. In 2024, Anthropic attracted several notable employees from OpenAI, including
Jan Leike Jan Leike (born ) is an AI alignment researcher who has worked at DeepMind and OpenAI. He joined Anthropic in May 2024. Education Jan Leike obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Freiburg in Germany. After earning a master's d ...
, John Schulman, and Durk Kingma.


Business structure

According to Anthropic, the company's goal is to research the safety and reliability of artificial intelligence systems. The Amodei siblings were among those who left OpenAI due to directional differences. Anthropic incorporated itself as a
Delaware Delaware ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic states, South Atlantic regions of the United States. It borders Maryland to its south and west, Pennsylvania to its north, New Jersey ...
public-benefit corporation (PBC), which enables directors to balance the financial interests of stockholders with its public benefit purpose. Anthropic's "Long-Term Benefit Trust" is a purpose trust for "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity". It holds Class T shares in the PBC which allow it to elect directors onto Anthropic's board. As of April 2025, the members of the Trust are Neil Buddy Shah, Kanika Bahl and Zach Robinson. Investors include
Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...
for $8B,
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
for $2B, and Menlo Ventures for $750M.Erin Griffith and Cade Metz
''Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.’s Hottest Start-Ups.''
In: ''NYT'', 20 February 2024. Retrieved 20 February 2024.


Key employees

*
Dario Amodei Dario Amodei (born 1983) is an American artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the large language model series Claude. He was previously the vice president of research ...
: Co-founder and chief executive officer *
Daniela Amodei Daniela Amodei (born ) is an American AI entrepreneur. She is the President and co-founder of the AI company Anthropic. Early life and education Her father, Riccardo Amodei, was a leather craftsman born in Italy. Her mother, Elena Engel, a Jew ...
: Co-founder and President *
Mike Krieger Michel Krieger (born March 4, 1986) is a Brazilian entrepreneur and software engineer who co-founded Instagram along with Kevin Systrom, and served as its CTO. During Krieger's tenure as CTO, Instagram's user base expanded from a few million to 1 ...
: Chief Product Officer *
Jan Leike Jan Leike (born ) is an AI alignment researcher who has worked at DeepMind and OpenAI. He joined Anthropic in May 2024. Education Jan Leike obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Freiburg in Germany. After earning a master's d ...
: ex-OpenAI alignment researcher


Projects


Claude

Claude incorporates "Constitutional AI" to set safety guidelines for the model's output. The name, "Claude", was chosen either as a reference to mathematician
Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of th ...
, or as a male name to contrast the female names of other A.I. assistants such as
Alexa Alexa may refer to: Technology *Amazon Alexa, a virtual assistant developed by Amazon * Alexa Internet, a defunct website ranking and traffic analysis service * Alexa Fluor, a family of fluorescent dyes * Arri Alexa, a digital motion picture ca ...
,
Siri Siri ( , backronym: Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface) is a digital assistant purchased, developed, and popularized by Apple Inc., which is included in the iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, Apple TV, audioOS, and visionOS operating sys ...
, and Cortana. Anthropic initially released two versions of its model, Claude and Claude Instant, in March 2023, with the latter being a more lightweight model. The next iteration, Claude 2, was launched in July 2023. Unlike Claude, which was only available to select users, Claude 2 is available for public use. Claude 3 was released in March 2024, with three language models: Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. The Opus model is the largest. According to Anthropic, it outperformed OpenAI's
GPT-4 Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a multimodal large language model trained and created by OpenAI and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. It was launched on March 14, 2023, and made publicly available via the p ...
and GPT-3.5, and Google's Gemini Ultra, in benchmark tests at the time. Sonnet and Haiku are Anthropic's medium- and small-sized models, respectively. All three models can accept image input. Amazon has added Claude 3 to its cloud AI service Bedrock. In May 2024, Anthropic announced the Claude Team plan, its first enterprise offering for Claude, and Claude iOS app. In June 2024, Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which demonstrated significantly improved performance on benchmarks compared to the larger Claude 3 Opus, notably in areas such as coding, multistep workflows, chart interpretation, and text extraction from images. Released alongside 3.5 Sonnet was the new Artifacts capability in which Claude was able to create code in a dedicated window in the interface and preview select code in real time such as websites or SVGs. In October 2024, Anthropic released an improved version of Claude 3.5, along with a beta feature called "Computer use", which enables Claude to take screenshots, click, and type text. In November 2024, Palantir announced a partnership with Anthropic and
Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...
to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Claude 3 and 3.5. According to Palantir, this was the first time that Claude would be used in "
classified Classified may refer to: General *Classified information, material that a government body deems to be sensitive *Classified advertising or "classifieds" Music *Classified (rapper) (born 1977), Canadian rapper * The Classified, a 1980s American ro ...
environments". In December 2024, Claude 3.5 Haiku was made available to all users on web and mobile platforms. In February 2025, Claude 3.7 Sonnet was introduced to all paid users. It is a "hybrid
reasoning Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, religion, scien ...
" model (one that responds directly to simple queries, while taking more time for complex problems).


Constitutional AI

According to Anthropic, Constitutional AI (CAI) is a framework developed to align AI systems with human values and ensure that they are helpful, harmless, and honest. Within this framework, humans provide a set of rules describing the desired behavior of the AI system, known as the "constitution". The AI system evaluates the generated output and then adjusts the AI models to better fit the constitution. The self-reinforcing process aims to avoid harm, respect preferences, and provide true information. Some of the principles of Claude 2's constitution are derived from documents such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple's terms of service. For example, one rule from the UN Declaration applied in Claude 2's CAI states "Please choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality and a sense of brotherhood."


Interpretability research

Anthropic also publishes research on the
interpretability In mathematical logic, interpretability is a relation between formal theories that expresses the possibility of interpreting or translating one into the other. Informal definition Assume ''T'' and ''S'' are formal theories. Slightly simplified, ...
of
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
systems, focusing on the
transformer In electrical engineering, a transformer is a passive component that transfers electrical energy from one electrical circuit to another circuit, or multiple Electrical network, circuits. A varying current in any coil of the transformer produces ...
architecture. Part of Anthropic's research aims to be able to automatically identify "features" in generative pretrained transformers like Claude. In a
neural network A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a network can perfor ...
, a feature is a pattern of neural activations that corresponds to a concept. In 2024, using a compute-intensive technique called "
dictionary learning Sparse dictionary learning (also known as sparse coding or SDL) is a representation learning method which aims to find a sparse representation of the input data in the form of a linear combination of basic elements as well as those basic elements ...
", Anthropic was able to identify millions of features in Claude, including for example one associated with the
Golden Gate Bridge The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate, the strait connecting San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean in California, United States. The structure links San Francisco—the northern tip of the San Francisco Peni ...
. Enhancing the ability to identify and edit features is expected to have significant safety implications. In March 2025, research by Anthropic suggested that multilingual LLMs partially process information in a conceptual space before converting it to the appropriate language. It also found evidence that LLMs can sometimes plan ahead. For example, when writing poetry, Claude identifies potential rhyming words before generating a line that ends with one of these words.


U.S. military and intelligence

Anthropic partnered with Palantir and
Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...
in November 2024 to provide the Claude model to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. Anthropic's CEO
Dario Amodei Dario Amodei (born 1983) is an American artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the large language model series Claude. He was previously the vice president of research ...
said about working with the U.S. military:
The position that we should never use AI in defense and intelligence settings doesn’t make sense to me. The position that we should go gangbusters and use it to make anything we want — up to and including doomsday weapons — that’s obviously just as crazy. We’re trying to seek the middle ground, to do things responsibly.
In June 2025, Anthropic announced a "Claude Gov" model. ''Ars Technica'' reported that, as of June 2025, it was in use at multiple US national security agencies.


Legal issues

On October 18, 2023, Anthropic was sued by
Concord Concord may refer to: Meaning "agreement" * Harmony, in music * Agreement (linguistics), a change in the form of a word depending on grammatical features of other words Arts and media * ''Concord'' (video game), a defunct 2024 first-person sh ...
,
Universal Universal is the adjective for universe. Universal may also refer to: Companies * NBCUniversal, a media and entertainment company that is a subsidiary of Comcast ** Universal Animation Studios, an American Animation studio, and a subsidiary of N ...
,
ABKCO ABKCO Music & Records, Inc. (Allen & Betty Klein Company) is an American independent record label, music publisher, and film and video production company. It owns and/or administers the rights to music by Sam Cooke, the Rolling Stones, the Animal ...
, and other music publishers for, per the complaint, "systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics."
Court Docket for Concord Music Group v Anthropic
', per CourtListener.
They alleged that the company used copyrighted material without permission in the form of song lyrics. The plaintiffs asked for up to $150,000 for each work infringed upon by Anthropic, citing infringement of copyright laws. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs support their allegations of copyright violations by citing several examples of Anthropic's Claude model outputting copied lyrics from songs such as
Katy Perry Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson (born October 25, 1984), known professionally as Katy Perry, is an American singer, songwriter, and television personality. She is one of the List of best-selling music artists, best-selling music artists in hist ...
's "Roar" and
Gloria Gaynor Gloria Fowles (born September 7, 1943), known professionally as Gloria Gaynor, is an American singer, best known for the disco era hits "I Will Survive" (1978), "I Have a Right, Let Me Know (I Have a Right)" (1979), "I Am What I Am (Broadway mus ...
's "I Will Survive". Additionally, the plaintiffs alleged that even given some prompts that did not directly state a song name, the model responded with modified lyrics based on original work. On January 16, 2024, Anthropic claimed that the music publishers were not unreasonably harmed and that the examples noted by plaintiffs were merely bugs. In August 2024, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Anthropic in California for alleged copyright infringement. The suit claims Anthropic fed its LLMs with pirated copies of the authors' work, including from participants Kirk Wallace Johnson, Andrea Bartz and Charles Graeber. In June 2025,
Reddit Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...
sued Anthropic, alleging that it is scraping data from the website in violation of its user agreement.


See also

*
Apprenticeship learning In artificial intelligence, apprenticeship learning (or learning from demonstration or imitation learning) is the process of learning by observing an expert.
*
AI alignment In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person's or group's intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. An AI system is considered ''aligned'' if it advances the intended objectives. A '' ...
*
Friendly AI Friendly artificial intelligence (friendly AI or FAI) is hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would have a positive (benign) effect on humanity or at least align with human interests such as fostering the improvement of the hu ...
*
Model Context Protocol The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, open-source framework introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 to standardize the way artificial intelligence (AI) models like large language models (LLMs) integrate and share data with exter ...


References


External links

* {{Artificial intelligence navbox 2021 establishments in California Artificial intelligence companies Artificial intelligence laboratories Companies based in San Francisco Public benefit corporations based in California