Anthropic

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 was 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 under the leadership of Sam Bankman-Fried.

In the summer of 2022, Anthropic finished training the first version of Claude but did not release it, citing the need for further internal safety testing and a desire to avoid initiating a potentially hazardous race to develop increasingly powerful AI systems.

Major investments

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. The remaining $2.75 billion was invested in March 2024. In November 2024, Amazon invested another $4 billion, doubling its total investment. 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.

In October 2023, Google invested $500 million in Anthropic and committed to an additional $1.5 billion over time. In March 2025, Google agreed to invest another $1 billion in Anthropic.

Recruitment (2024)

In February 2024, Anthropic hired former Google Books head of partnerships Tom Turvey, and tasked him with obtaining "all the books in the world". The company then began using destructive book scanning to digitize "millions" of books to train Claude.

In 2024, Anthropic attracted several notable employees from OpenAI, including Jan Leike, John Schulman, and Durk Kingma.

Additional funding and partnerships (2025)

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. In March, Databricks and Anthropic announced that Claude would be integrated into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.

In May 2025, the company announced Claude 4, introducing both Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 with improved coding capabilities and other new features. It also introduced new API capabilities, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector. The company hosted its inaugural developer conference that month. Also in May, Anthropic launched a web search API that enables Claude to access real-time information from the internet. Claude Code, Anthropic's coding assistant, transitioned from research preview to general availability, featuring integrations with VS Code and JetBrains IDEs and support for GitHub Actions.

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. The same month, 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.

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). According to Anthropic, the partnership will bring more than one gigawatt of AI compute capacity online by 2026.

In November 2025, Nvidia, Microsoft and Anthropic announced a partnership deal. 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.

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 tricked Claude into carrying out automated subtasks by pretending it was for defensive testing.

In December 2025, Anthropic acquired Bun to improve the speed and stability of Claude Code.

In December 2025, Anthropic signed a multi-year, $200 million partnership with Snowflake to make Claude models available through Snowflake's platform as the companies expanded enterprise deployments of AI tools and agents.

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.

Business structure

According to Anthropic, its goal is to research AI systems' safety and reliability. The Amodei siblings were among those who left OpenAI due to directional differences.

Anthropic incorporated itself as a Delaware public-benefit corporation (PBC), which enables directors to balance stockholders' financial interests 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 to Anthropic's board. As of October 2025, the members of the Trust are Neil Buddy Shah, Kanika Bahl, Zach Robinson, and Richard Fontaine.

Investors include Amazon at $8 billion, Google at $2 billion, and Menlo Ventures at $750 million.

In January 2026, Anthropic introduced a division called "Labs", with Mike Krieger (formerly the company's Chief Product Officer) joining it.

Notable employees

• Dario Amodei: co-founder and CEO
• Daniela Amodei: co-founder and President
• Mike Krieger: Chief Product Officer
• Jan Leike: co-lead of the Alignment Science team, ex-OpenAI alignment researcher
• Amanda Askell: philosopher working on Claude’s character

Product

Main article: Claude (language model)

Anthropic's flagship product line is the "Claude" series of large language models, which some employees consider a reference to mathematician Claude Shannon. One of the techniques used to fine-tune Claude models is constitutional AI, in which the AI is trained to adhere to a set of principles called a constitution. The company makes the models available via a web interface, an API, Amazon Bedrock, an iOS app, and Mac and Windows desktop apps.

Claude Code is a command-line AI agent often used for coding. "Cowork" is an equivalent with a graphical user interface, intended to be simpler to use.

Release history

Claude's first two versions, Claude and Claude Instant, were released in March 2023, but only Anthropic-approved users could use them. The next iteration, Claude 2, was launched to the public in July 2023.

In March 2024, Anthropic released three language models: Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Haiku, in decreasing order of performance. In June 2024, Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet. In October 2024, the company released Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new) and Claude 3.5 Haiku. In February 2025, it released Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

In May 2025, Anthropic released Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet. It released Claude Opus 4.1 that August, Claude Sonnet 4.5 that September, Claude Haiku 4.5 that October, and Claude Opus 4.5 that November.

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. 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.

In July 2025, the United States Department of Defense announced that Anthropic had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Google, OpenAI, and xAI.

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.

Anthropic partnered with Iceland's Ministry of Education and Children in 2025 to allow teachers to access Claude and integrate AI into daily teaching.

Research

Constitutional AI

Main article: 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

Anthropic also publishes research on the interpretability of machine learning systems, focusing on the transformer 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 feature is a pattern of neural activations that corresponds to a concept. In 2024, using a compute-intensive technique called "dictionary learning", Anthropic was able to identify millions of features in Claude, including for example one associated with the Golden Gate Bridge. 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.

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". 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.

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." 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's "Roar" and Gloria Gaynor'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. 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 of pirated copies could not be a 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. 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 approval, stands as the largest copyright resolution in U.S. history.

In June 2025, Reddit sued Anthropic, alleging that Anthropic is scraping data from the website in violation of Reddit's user agreement.

References

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