Anthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company headquartered in San Francisco, California, founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei together with several other researchers who left OpenAI, including Tom Brown, Jared Kaplan, and Chris Olah. The company positions AI safety as central to its mission, arguing that increasingly capable models require correspondingly rigorous safety research conducted in parallel with, rather than after, capability development. Its flagship product is the Claude (AI model family) family of large language models, named after mathematician and information theorist Claude Shannon.
History
Several of Anthropic's founders were senior OpenAI researchers involved in that company's GPT-3 and safety work; Dario Amodei had led OpenAI's research organization before departing amid reported disagreements over the balance between commercial deployment and safety practices. Anthropic released its first Claude model in 2023, followed by faster iteration across Claude 2, Claude 3, and subsequent versions that grew increasingly competitive with OpenAI's GPT models and Google's Gemini on independent benchmarks and public usage. The company raised large funding rounds from investors including Google and Microsoft (AI)'s rival Amazon, both of which took significant minority stakes and supplied cloud computing capacity, positioning Anthropic as a major beneficiary of and competitor within the broader AI boom (2022-present).
Mission and approach
Anthropic describes itself as an "AI safety company" and has published research on Mechanistic interpretability (understanding what is happening inside trained models), AI alignment, and Red teaming (AI). Its signature training technique, Constitutional AI, introduced in a 2022 paper, trains a model to critique and revise its own outputs according to a written set of principles rather than relying solely on human raters for every judgment, an approach the company has framed as a more scalable complement to standard RLHF. Anthropic has also published a public framework of "responsible scaling policies," committing to specific safety evaluations and safeguards tied to a model's capability level before further scaling, an approach echoed by other labs under the broader umbrella of Responsible scaling policies.
Products
Beyond the Claude chat assistant, Anthropic built Claude Code, an agentic command-line coding tool released in 2025, and an API business serving developers building on its models, competing directly with OpenAI's and Google's developer platforms. The company introduced the Model Context Protocol in late 2024, an open standard for connecting language models to external tools and data sources that saw adoption beyond Anthropic's own products.
Funding and partnerships
Anthropic's growth has been financed substantially by Amazon and Google, both major providers of the cloud computing infrastructure needed to train models at Scaling laws-driven frontier scale, an arrangement that has drawn scrutiny for concentrating dependence on a small number of large technology companies even among labs explicitly organized around safety concerns. By the mid-2020s, Anthropic was widely regarded, alongside OpenAI and Google DeepMind, as one of the handful of labs training genuinely Frontier model-class systems.