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Company type | Private |
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Industry | Artificial intelligence |
Founded | 2021 |
Founders |
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Headquarters | 500 Howard Street, [4] San Francisco, California, U.S. |
Key people | |
Products | Claude Claude Code |
Number of employees | 1,300 (2025) [5] |
Website | anthropic.com |
Part of a series on |
Artificial intelligence (AI) |
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Anthropic PBC is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup company founded in 2021. It has developed a family of large language models (LLMs) named Claude. 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. [6] [7]
Anthropic was founded by former members of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei (who serves as CEO). [8] In September 2023, Amazon announced an investment of up to $4 billion. Google committed $2 billion the next month. [9] [10] [11] As of September 2025, [update] Anthropic is the fourth most valuable private company globally, valued at over $183 billion. [12] [13]
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. [14] [15]
In April 2022, Anthropic announced it had received $580 million in funding, [16] including a $500 million investment from FTX under the leadership of Sam Bankman-Fried. [17] [3]
In the summer of 2022, Anthropic finished training the first version of Claude but did not 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. [18]
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. [9] The remaining $2.75 billion was invested in March 2024. [19] In November 2024, Amazon invested another $4 billion, doubling its total investment. [20] 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. [9] [21]
In October 2023, Google invested $500 million in Anthropic and committed to an additional $1.5 billion over time. [11] In March 2025, Google agreed to invest another $1 billion in Anthropic. [22]
In February 2024, Anthropic hired former Google Books head of partnerships Tom Turvey, and tasked him with obtaining "all the books in the world". [23] The company then began using destructive book scanning to digitize "millions" of books to train Claude. [23]
In 2024, Anthropic attracted several notable employees from OpenAI, including Jan Leike, John Schulman, and Durk Kingma. [24]
Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in a Series E funding round in March, achieving a post-money valuation of $61.5 billion, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from several major investors. [25] [26] In March, Databricks and Anthropic announced that Claude would be integrated into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. [27] [28]
In May, the company announced Claude 4, introducing both Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 with improved coding capabilities and other new features. [29] It also introduced new API capabilities, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector. [29] In May, Anthropic launched a web search API that enables Claude to access real-time information from the internet. [30] 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. [29]
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. [31] [32] 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. [33]
According to Anthropic, its goal is to research AI systems' safety and reliability. [7] The Amodei siblings were among those who left OpenAI due to directional differences. [15]
Anthropic incorporated itself as a Delaware public-benefit corporation (PBC), which enables directors to balance stockholders' financial interests with its public benefit purpose. [34]
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. [35] [36] As of April 2025, the members of the Trust are Neil Buddy Shah, Kanika Bahl, and Zach Robinson. [37]
Investors include Amazon at $8 billion, [38] Google at $2 billion, [11] and Menlo Ventures at $750 million. [39]
Claude incorporates "Constitutional AI" to set safety guidelines for the model's output. [44] The name "Claude" was chosen as a reference to mathematician Claude Shannon, and as a masculine name to contrast with the feminine names of AI assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana. [3]
In March 2023, Anthropic released two versions of its model, Claude and Claude Instant, the latter being more lightweight. [45] [46] [47] The next iteration, Claude 2, was launched in July 2023. [48] Unlike Claude, which was only available to select users, Claude 2 is available for public use. [49]
Claude 3 was released in March 2024, with three language models: Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. [50] [51] The Opus model is the largest. According to Anthropic, it outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4 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 accept image input. [50] Amazon has added Claude 3 to its cloud AI service Bedrock. [52]
In May 2024, Anthropic announced the Claude Team plan, its first enterprise offering for Claude, and Claude iOS app. [53]
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 coding, multistep workflows, chart interpretation, and text extraction from images. Released alongside 3.5 Sonnet was the new Artifacts capability, in which Claude generates content in a dedicated window and renders interactive elements such as websites or SVGs in real time. [54]
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. [55]
In November 2024, Palantir announced a partnership with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services to give 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 environments". [56]
In December 2024, Claude 3.5 Haiku was made available to all users on web and mobile platforms. [57]
In February 2025, Claude 3.7 Sonnet was introduced to all paid users. It is a "hybrid reasoning" model (one that responds directly to simple queries, while taking more time for complex problems). [58] [59]
In May 2025, Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet were introduced. With these models, Anthropic also introduced Extended thinking with tool use and the ability to use tools in parallel. [60]
In August 2025, Claude Opus 4.1 was introduced. [61]
In November 2024, Anthropic partnered with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to provide the Claude model to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. [62] [63] 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. [64]
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. [65]
In August 2025, Anthropic launched a Higher Education Advisory Board, chaired by former Yale University president and former Coursera CEO Rick Levin. [66]
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. [14] [67] Within this framework, humans provide a set of rules describing the desired behavior of the AI system, known as the "constitution". [67] The AI system evaluates the generated output and then adjusts the AI models to better fit the constitution. [67] The self-reinforcing process aims to avoid harm, respect preferences, and provide true information. [67]
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. [48] 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." [48]
Anthropic also publishes research on the interpretability of machine learning systems, focusing on the transformer architecture. [14] [68] [69]
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. [70] [71] [72]
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. [73] [74]
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". [75] Earlier in the year, Amodei predicted that AI would wipe out white-collar jobs, especially entry-level jobs in finance, law, and consulting. [76] [77]
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." [78] [79] [80] They alleged that the company used copyrighted material without permission in the form of song lyrics. [81] The plaintiffs asked for up to $150,000 for each work infringed upon by Anthropic, citing infringement of copyright laws. [81] 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". [81] 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. [81]
On January 16, 2024, Anthropic claimed that the music publishers were not unreasonably harmed and that the examples noted by plaintiffs were merely bugs. [82]
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. [83] 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. [84] 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. [85] [86]
In June 2025, Reddit sued Anthropic, alleging that Anthropic is scraping data from the website in violation of Reddit's user agreement. [87]