Anthropic
US-based AI company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anthropic is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company headquartered in San Francisco. It has developed a range of large language models (LLMs) named Claude and focuses on AI safety.[7]
- Dario Amodei
- Daniela Amodei
- Jared Kaplan[1]
- Jack Clark[2]
- Chris Olah[3]
- Ben Mann[4]
- Sam McCandlish[3]
- Tom Brown[3]
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Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Artificial intelligence |
| Founded | 2021 |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | 500 Howard Street,[5] San Francisco, California, U.S. |
Key people |
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| Products |
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Number of employees | 2,500 (2026)[6] |
| Website | anthropic.com |
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, who are president and CEO, respectively.[8] The company is privately held and, as of February 2026,[update] had an estimated value of $380 billion.[9]
History
2021–2023
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former employees of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, the latter of whom was OpenAI's Vice President of Research.[10][11]
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.[12] It was released in March 2023.[13]
2024–present
In 2024, Anthropic hired several notable employees from OpenAI, including Jan Leike and John Schulman.[14]
In May 2025, the company announced Claude 4. It also introduced new API capabilities, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector.[15] The company hosted its inaugural developer conference that month.[16] Also in May, Anthropic launched a web search API that enables Claude to access real-time information from the internet.[17] Claude Code, Anthropic's coding assistant, transitioned from research preview to general availability.[15]
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.[18]
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.[19] 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.[20]
In November 2025, Anthropic said that hackers sponsored by the Chinese government used Claude to perform automated cyberattacks against around 30 global organisations. The hackers bypassed Anthropic's safeguards by pretending it was for defensive testing.[21][22]
In December 2025, Anthropic acquired Bun to improve the speed and stability of Claude Code.[23] The same month, Anthropic signed a multi-year, $200 million partnership with Snowflake Inc. to make Claude models available through that company's platform.[24]
In February 2026, Anthropic aired two commercials during Super Bowl LX[25][26] 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.[26]
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 domestic surveillance and fully 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.[27][28]
Business structure
According to Anthropic, its goal is to research AI systems' safety and reliability.[29] The Amodei siblings were among those who left OpenAI due to directional differences.[11] Anthropic operates as a public benefit corporation.[30]
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 to Anthropic's board.[31] As of January 2026, the members of the Trust are Neil Buddy Shah, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Richard Fontaine.[29]
In January 2026, Anthropic introduced a division called "Labs", with Mike Krieger (formerly the company's Chief Product Officer) joining it.[32]
In March 2026, Anthropic launched the Anthropic Institute, a think tank led by Jack Clark studying AI.[30]
Notable employees
- Dario Amodei: co-founder and CEO
- Daniela Amodei: co-founder and president
- Amanda Askell: philosopher working on Claude's character[33]
- Nicholas Carlini: researcher
- Jack Clark: a co-founder and the head of policy.[34]
- Jared Kaplan: co-founder and chief science officer[35]
- Mike Krieger: Chief Product Officer[36][37]
- Jan Leike: co-lead of the Alignment Science team, former OpenAI alignment researcher[38][39]
- Chris Olah, co-founder, interpretability research
Product
Anthropic's flagship product line is the "Claude" series of large language models,[40] which some employees consider a reference to mathematician Claude Shannon.[4] 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.[41] The company makes the models available via a web interface,[42] an API,[42] Amazon Bedrock,[43] an iOS app,[44] and Mac and Windows desktop apps.[45]
Claude Code is a command-line AI agent designed for coding. "Cowork" is an equivalent with a graphical user interface, intended to be simpler to use.[46] While Claude Code is tailored toward developers, Cowork is designed for non-technical users, enabling them to automate file and task management (including reading, editing and writing new files) without requiring programming knowledge.[47]
With the advent of Claude Code, vibe coding became increasingly popular. Vibe coding is a programming approach in which users describe desired outcomes in natural language and let an AI agent write the code. The term was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and rapidly gained popularity as AI coding tools became more ubiquitous.[48]
Release history
Claude's first two versions, Claude and Claude Instant, were released in March 2023,[49][50] but only Anthropic-approved users could use them.[51] The next iteration, Claude 2, was launched to the public in July 2023.[52]
In March 2024, Anthropic released three language models: Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Haiku, in decreasing order of performance.[53] In June 2024, it released Claude 3.5 Sonnet.[54]
In May 2025, Anthropic released Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet.[55] In February 2026, it released Claude Opus 4.6,[56] followed by Sonnet 4.6.[57]
Funding
In April 2022, Anthropic announced it had received $580 million in funding,[58] including a $500 million investment from FTX under the leadership of Sam Bankman-Fried.[59][4] 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.[60] The remaining $2.75 billion was invested in March 2024.[61] In November 2024, Amazon invested another $4 billion, doubling its total investment.[62] As part of the deal, Anthropic uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider and makes its AI models available to AWS customers.[60]
In October 2023, Google invested $500 million in Anthropic and committed to an additional $1.5 billion over time.[63] In March 2025, Google agreed to invest another $1 billion in Anthropic.[64]
Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in a Series E funding round in March 2025, achieving a post-money valuation of $61.5 billion, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from several major investors.[65][66]
In September 2025, Anthropic completed a Series F funding round, raising $13 billion at a post-money valuation of $183 billion. The round was co-led by Iconiq Capital, Fidelity Management & Research, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from the Qatar Investment Authority and other investors.[67][68]
On 31 December 2025, it was confirmed that Anthropic had signed a term sheet for a $10 billion funding round led by Coatue and GIC, at a $350 billion valuation.[69]
On February 12, 2026, Anthropic announced that it had raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round, bringing its post-money valuation to $380 billion.[70][71]
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.[72][73] 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.[74] As of February 2026, Anthropic's partnership with Palantir makes Claude the only AI model used in classified missions.[75]
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.[76]
According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. military used Claude in its 2026 raid on Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro. Exactly how Claude was used is unknown. The intervention resulted in the deaths of 83 people.[77][78]
Anthropic's usage policy prohibits directly using Claude for domestic surveillance or in fully autonomous weapons.[79] White House officials said that these restrictions prevented federal contractors working with the FBI and Secret Service from using it.[80] Tension regarding this policy has arisen with The Pentagon and the Trump administration.[79][81]
On February 24, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to cut Anthropic out of the DoD's supply chain by February 27 if Anthropic did not permit unrestricted use of Claude, or he would invoke the Defense Production Act to assert unrestricted use without an agreement.[75][82] On February 26, Anthropic rejected the Pentagon's demands to drop AI safeguards.[83] On February 27, after the deadline, President Donald Trump ordered U.S. government agencies to stop using models developed by Anthropic.[84] The action was described as retaliatory.[85][86]
Two days later, it was reported that the US military had used Claude via Palantir's Maven Smart System during its attacks on Iran at the outset of the 2026 Iran war.[87][88] It was later announced that the Pentagon was investigating whether Claude played a role in the U.S. strike on the Iranian girls' school that killed over 170 people, mostly children.[89]
On March 5, the Pentagon officially deemed Anthropic a supply chain risk, after which the company said it saw "no choice but to challenge ... in court".[90] In March, leaders from Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft supported Anthropic's lawsuit against the DoD.[91] On March 11, a Pentagon memo revealed its decision that Anthropic's AI tools may be used in rare circumstances beyond the previously announced six-month phase-out period if deemed necessary for national security.[92]
On March 26, the federal judge presiding over the case issued a temporary injunction against the Pentagon's actions, writing, "This appears to be classic First Amendment retaliation."[93][94]
Education-related projects
In August 2025, Anthropic launched a Higher Education Advisory Board, chaired by former Yale University president and former Coursera CEO Rick Levin.[95]
Anthropic partnered with Iceland's Ministry of Education and Children in 2025 to allow teachers to access Claude and integrate AI into daily teaching.[96]
Project Panama
In January 2026, unsealed court filings from a 2024 class-action copyright lawsuit against Anthropic revealed the existence of the company's confidential "Project Panama" operation. In an internal planning document, Project Panama is described as Anthropic's "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world".[97] To this end, the company purchased millions of used books from online retailers such as Better World Books, sliced off their spines and scanned their pages in order to train Claude.[97][98] The paper was then recycled. Tom Turvey, who helped create Google Books, was hired for the operation. According to the Project Panama planning document, Anthropic did not "want it to be known that [it was] working on this".[97] Judge William Alsup ruled that the destruction of legally purchased books constituted fair use, in contrast to Anthropic's prior use of pirated copies.[97][98]
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.[10][99] 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."[52] The AI system evaluates the generated output and then adjusts the AI models to better fit the constitution.[99]
Interpretability
Anthropic also carries out and publishes research on the interpretability of machine learning systems.[10][100]
Anthropic has conducted research on "features" (patterns of neural activation in a neural network that correspond to concepts). In 2024, using a compute-intensive technique called "dictionary learning", Anthropic identified millions of these patterns in Claude, such as one associated with the Golden Gate Bridge.[101][102][103]
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.[104][105]
Automation
In September 2025, Anthropic released a report saying that businesses primarily use AI for automation rather than collaboration, with three-quarters of companies that work with Claude using it for "full task delegation".[106] Earlier in the year, CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI would wipe out white-collar jobs, especially entry-level jobs in finance, law, and consulting.[107][108]
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."[109][110][111] They alleged that the company used copyrighted material without permission in the form of song lyrics.[112] The plaintiffs asked for up to $150,000 for each work infringed upon by Anthropic, citing infringement of copyright laws.[112] 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's "I Will Survive".[112] 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.[112]
On January 16, 2024, Anthropic claimed that the music publishers were not unreasonably harmed and that the examples noted by the plaintiffs were merely bugs.[113]
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.[114] On June 23, 2025, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted summary judgment for Anthropic that the use of digital copies of the plaintiffs' works (inter alia) for the purpose of training Anthropic's LLMs was a fair use. But it found that Anthropic had used millions of pirated library copies, and that such use could not constitute fair use. Therefore, the case was ordered to go to trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages.[115] In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle the case, amounting to $3,000 per book plus interest. The proposed settlement, pending judge's approval, stands as the largest copyright resolution in U.S. history.[116][117]
In June 2025, Reddit sued Anthropic for "unlawful and unfair business acts", alleging that Anthropic was in violation of Reddit's user agreement by training its models on users' personal data without their consent.[118][119]
