Anthropic, PBC[6][7] is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California, founded with the goal of promoting AI safety.[8] Its flagship product is Claude, a series of large language models (LLMs). Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, who are president and CEO, respectively.[9] The company is privately held but plans to go public. It had an estimated valuation of $965 billion in May 2026, making it the most valuable pure-play AI company in the world.[10]
History
Anthropic was founded in January 2021[11] by seven former employees of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, the latter of whom was OpenAI's Vice President of Research.[12][13] They raised $124 million in May 2021.[14] In the summer of 2022, Anthropic finished training the first version of Claude but did not immediately release it, citing a need for further internal safety testing and a desire to avoid initiating a potentially hazardous race to develop increasingly powerful AI systems.[15] It was released in March 2023.[16]
In 2024, Anthropic hired several notable employees from OpenAI, including Jan Leike and John Schulman.[17] In May 2025, the company announced Claude 4. It also introduced new API capabilities, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector.[18] The company hosted its inaugural developer conference that month.[19] Also in May, Anthropic launched a web search API that enables Claude to access real-time information from the internet.[20] Claude Code, Anthropic's coding assistant, transitioned from research preview to general availability.[18]
In July 2025, Anthropic signed a two-year contract with the US Department of Defense for $200 million. Anthropic LLMs became integrated with the Pentagon's classified intelligence networks and with Palantir's data platform. Anthropic stipulated that the Pentagon not use its technologies for mass surveillance of Americans, or to create autonomous weapons.[21]
In September 2025, Anthropic announced that it would stop selling its products to groups majority-owned by Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or North Korean entities due to national security concerns.[22] In October 2025, Anthropic announced a cloud partnership with Google, giving it access to up to one million of Google's custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), potentially adding more than one gigawatt of AI compute capacity by 2026.[23] In November, Nvidia and Microsoft were expected to invest up to $15 billion in Anthropic, and Anthropic said it would buy $30 billion of computing capacity from Microsoft Azure running on Nvidia AI systems.[24]
In November 2025, Anthropic said that hackers sponsored by the Chinese government used Claude to perform automated cyberattacks against around 30 global organizations. The hackers bypassed Anthropic's safeguards by pretending it was for defensive testing.[25][26] In December 2025, Anthropic acquired Bun to improve Claude Code's speed and stability.[27] The same month, Anthropic signed a multi-year, $200 million partnership with Snowflake Inc. to make Claude models available through that company's platform.[28]
Claude was reportedly used during the 2026 United States intervention in Venezuela.[21] In February 2026, Anthropic aired two commercials during Super Bowl LX[29][30] as part of a broader marketing campaign called "A Time and a Place", with four ads created by Mother. Each ad depicts AI assistants suddenly pivoting to promoting a fictional product in the middle of a conversation. Anthropic said that Claude will stay ad-free, in contrast to its competitor OpenAI, which introduced ads to the free version of ChatGPT.[30] Also in February 2026, Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action, an AI regulation advocacy group.[31]
In 2026, Anthropic refused the United States Department of Defense's (DoD) demand to remove contractual restrictions prohibiting the use of its AI technology for surveillance and autonomous weapons. After the refusal, the DoD designated the company a "supply chain risk" and barred all U.S. military private contractors, suppliers, and partners from doing business with the firm (see Anthropic–United States Department of Defense dispute).[32][33] At the outset of the 2026 Iran war, the US military used Claude to identify and rank targets in Iran according to their strategic importance, to generate strike sequences, and to write legal justifications for the strikes.[21]
In May 2026, Anthropic announced a deal with xAI for use of its Colossus 1 data center to expand its model capacity.[34][35] On May 18, the company acquired software startup Stainless for an undisclosed sum.[36] It also made a $1.8 billion cloud computing deal with Akamai Technologies.[37] Also in May, The New York Times reported that Anthropic was seeking to file an initial public offering (IPO), with a target of debuting in the fall of 2026.[38] On June 1, Anthropic announced it had filed confidential IPO papers with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.[39]
In July 2026, TeraWulf Inc. announced that Anthropic had signed a 20-year lease for a data center in development on a campus called Justified Data in Hawesville, Kentucky.[43]
Business structure
According to Anthropic, its goal is to research AI systems' safety and reliability.[44] The Amodei siblings were among those who left OpenAI due to directional differences.[13] Anthropic operates as a public benefit corporation.[45] In January 2026, Anthropic introduced a division called "Labs", with Mike Krieger, formerly the company's Chief Product Officer, joining it.[46] In March 2026, Anthropic launched the Anthropic Institute, a think tank studying AI led by Jack Clark.[45]
Notable employees
Product
Anthropic's flagship product line is the "Claude" series of large language models,[56] which some employees consider a reference to mathematician Claude Shannon.[57] One of the techniques used to fine-tune Claude models is called "constitutional AI", in which the LLM is trained to adhere to a set of principles called a constitution.[58] The company makes the models available via a web interface,[59] an API,[59] Amazon Bedrock,[60] an iOS app,[61]
Funding
In April 2022, Anthropic announced it had received $580 million in funding,[76] including a $500 million investment from FTX under the leadership of Sam Bankman-Fried.[77][57] In September 2023, Amazon announced a partnership with Anthropic. Amazon became a minority stakeholder by initially investing $1.25 billion and planning a total investment of $4 billion.[78] The remaining $2.75 billion was invested in March 2024.[79] In November 2024, Amazon invested another $4 billion, doubling its total investment.[80]
Projects
U.S. military and intelligence
In November 2024, Anthropic partnered with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to provide the Claude model to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies.[90][91] In June 2025, Anthropic announced a "Claude Gov" model. Ars Technica reported that as of June 2025, it was in use at multiple U.S. national security agencies.[92] As of February 2026, Anthropic's partnership with Palantir makes Claude the only AI model used in classified missions.[93] In July 2025, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) announced that Anthropic had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Google, OpenAI, and xAI.[94]
Research
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.[12][118] Within this framework, a set of guidelines known as the "constitution" describes the desired behavior of the AI system. Claude 2's constitution includes phrases 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 constitution is "Please choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality and a sense of brotherhood."[69] The AI system evaluates the generated output and then adjusts the AI models to better fit the constitution.[118]
Interpretability
Legal issues
On October 18, 2023, Anthropic was sued by Concord, Universal, ABKCO, and other music publishers for, per the complaint, "systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics."[128][129][130] They alleged that the company used copyrighted material without permission in the form of song lyrics.[131] The plaintiffs asked for up to $150,000 for each work infringed upon by Anthropic, citing infringement of copyright laws.[131] 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's "Roar" and Gloria Gaynor
See also
- Apprenticeship learning
- AI alignment
- AI warfare
- Friendly AI
- Mechanistic interpretability
External links
References
- Belle Lin. Google and Anthropic Are Selling Generative AI to Businesses, Even as They Address Its Shortcomings WSJ, retrieved 2024-04-11^
- Stephen Nellis. Alphabet-backed Anthropic outlines the moral values behind its AI bot Reuters, 9 May 2023, retrieved 4 June 2023^
- Ian Thomas. CNBC Disruptor 50