Anthropic
Based on Wikipedia: Anthropic
In the summer of 2022, a small team of researchers finished building something remarkable—and then refused to release it. They had created Claude, an artificial intelligence system capable of engaging in sophisticated conversation, but they kept it locked away for months of internal testing. Their reasoning? They worried that rushing to market might spark a dangerous race to build ever more powerful AI systems before anyone understood how to make them safe.
This was Anthropic's founding philosophy in action.
The OpenAI Exodus
Anthropic exists because of a schism. In 2021, seven researchers walked away from OpenAI, the company that had become synonymous with cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Among them were siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei—Dario had been OpenAI's Vice President of Research, one of the most senior technical positions at the organization.
What drove them to leave? The official language is diplomatic: "directional differences." But the subtext is clear enough. OpenAI had begun its transformation from a nonprofit research lab into a commercial juggernaut, eventually partnering with Microsoft and racing to release products like ChatGPT. The Amodei faction believed something essential was being lost in that sprint toward commercial deployment—namely, the careful study of how to make these systems reliably safe.
So they started over.
A Different Kind of Corporation
Anthropic structured itself as a public-benefit corporation, a legal form that originated in Delaware and allows company directors to balance profit-seeking with broader social goals. This is unusual in Silicon Valley, where the standard venture-backed startup exists solely to maximize shareholder returns.
But Anthropic went further. They created something called the "Long-Term Benefit Trust"—a purpose trust that holds special shares allowing it to elect directors to the company's board. The trust's stated mission is "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity." As of late 2025, this trust is overseen by four members: Neil Buddy Shah, Kanika Bahl, Zach Robinson, and Richard Fontaine.
Whether these governance structures will prove meaningful in practice—especially under pressure from investors who have poured billions into the company—remains an open question. But the intent, at least, is to build guardrails that could prevent Anthropic from abandoning safety research even if it became profitable to do so.
The Money Floods In
For a company supposedly focused on careful, measured AI development, Anthropic has attracted a staggering amount of capital in a remarkably short time.
The investment history reads like a series of escalating bets. In April 2022, the company announced $580 million in funding, with $500 million coming from FTX—the cryptocurrency exchange that would spectacularly collapse later that year, sending its founder Sam Bankman-Fried to prison for fraud. That particular investment has become something of an embarrassment, though Anthropic itself was never implicated in FTX's wrongdoing.
Then came the tech giants.
Amazon arrived first, investing $1.25 billion in September 2023 with a commitment to eventually reach $4 billion. They hit that target in March 2024, then doubled down with another $4 billion in November, bringing Amazon's total stake to $8 billion. In exchange, Anthropic agreed to use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider and to make Claude available to AWS customers.
Google wasn't far behind. They invested $500 million in October 2023, committed another $1.5 billion over time, and added $1 billion more in March 2025. Their total: $2 billion.
By late 2025, Anthropic had completed two massive funding rounds—$3.5 billion in March 2025 (valuing the company at $61.5 billion) and $13 billion in September (pushing the valuation to $183 billion). Then came a November announcement that Nvidia and Microsoft planned to invest up to $15 billion, with Anthropic committing to buy $30 billion of computing capacity from Microsoft Azure running on Nvidia hardware.
The valuations are dizzying. By November 2025, Anthropic was worth over $350 billion—making it one of the most valuable private companies in history, and this for a firm that had existed for barely four years.
Constitutional AI: Teaching Values to Machines
What makes Claude different from other AI systems? Anthropic's answer is something they call Constitutional AI, or CAI.
The idea is straightforward in concept, if not in execution. Rather than training an AI solely on human feedback about whether individual responses are good or bad, you give the AI a set of principles—a "constitution"—that describes how it should behave. The AI then learns to evaluate its own outputs against these principles and adjusts accordingly.
Claude's constitution draws from sources you might not expect. Some rules come from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One principle asks the AI to "choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality and a sense of brotherhood." Other rules, somewhat incongruously, derive from Apple's terms of service.
The goal is to produce an AI that is, in Anthropic's formulation, "helpful, harmless, and honest." The name Claude itself is a small gesture toward this mission—it honors Claude Shannon, the mathematician who founded information theory. The masculine name was also chosen deliberately to contrast with the feminine names given to AI assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, though exactly what statement this makes remains somewhat unclear.
The Claude Family Tree
Anthropic's AI models have evolved rapidly since that first version sat unreleased in 2022.
The public timeline begins in March 2023, when Anthropic released two versions: Claude and Claude Instant, a lighter-weight alternative. Claude 2 followed in July 2023, notable for being the first version available to the general public rather than a select group of testers.
Claude 3, released in March 2024, introduced a naming scheme that persists today: Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. These names, borrowed from poetic forms, denote different sizes of model. Opus is the largest and most capable—Anthropic claimed it outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini Ultra on benchmark tests. Sonnet occupies the middle ground. Haiku is the smallest and fastest.
All three can process images as well as text, a capability that has become standard among frontier AI systems.
The most significant 2024 release was Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June, which introduced something called Artifacts—a feature allowing Claude to generate interactive content like websites or graphics in real-time, displayed in a dedicated window. October brought an improved 3.5 Sonnet along with a beta feature called "Computer use," enabling Claude to see a computer screen via screenshots and interact with it through clicks and keystrokes. This capability hints at a future where AI systems don't just answer questions but actually operate computers on your behalf.
February 2025 saw Claude 3.7 Sonnet, described as a "hybrid reasoning" model. Simple queries get quick responses; complex problems trigger extended deliberation. May 2025 brought Claude 4, introducing both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 with enhanced coding abilities. The latest iteration, as of late 2025, is Claude Opus 4.1 (released August 2025), Claude Sonnet 4.5 (September 2025), and Claude Haiku 4.5 (October 2025).
Looking Inside the Black Box
One of the persistent challenges with neural networks—the computational architecture underlying systems like Claude—is that they're notoriously difficult to understand. You can see what goes in and what comes out, but the internal processing is largely opaque, a tangle of billions of numerical weights that don't map neatly onto human concepts.
Anthropic has invested significant research effort into what's called interpretability: the attempt to understand what's actually happening inside these systems.
In 2024, using a computationally expensive technique called dictionary learning, Anthropic researchers identified millions of "features" in Claude. A feature, in this context, is a pattern of neural activity that corresponds to some concept or idea. One famous example: they found a feature associated with the Golden Gate Bridge. When they artificially enhanced this feature's activation, Claude became obsessed with the bridge, inserting references to it into conversations where it had no business appearing.
This might sound like a parlor trick, but the implications are serious. If you can identify which internal patterns correspond to which concepts, you might be able to detect when a model is about to produce harmful content—or even edit the model to prevent certain behaviors entirely.
More recent research, published in March 2025, explored how multilingual AI models handle different languages. The findings suggest that Claude partially processes information in a language-agnostic conceptual space before translating it into whatever language is appropriate for the response. Even more intriguingly, the research found evidence that Claude can plan ahead: when writing poetry, it apparently identifies potential rhyming words before composing a line that ends with one of them.
Into the National Security Apparatus
For a company founded on principles of AI safety, Anthropic has moved with remarkable speed into military and intelligence applications.
In November 2024, Palantir—the controversial data analytics company with deep ties to the U.S. intelligence community—announced a partnership with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services. Claude would be made available to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. According to Palantir, this marked the first time Claude would operate in "classified environments."
The military relationship deepened in 2025. June saw the announcement of "Claude Gov," a version specifically designed for government use; Ars Technica reported it was already running at multiple U.S. national security agencies. In July, the Department of Defense revealed that Anthropic had received a $200 million contract for military AI applications—alongside Google, OpenAI, and Elon Musk's xAI.
Meanwhile, in September 2025, Anthropic announced it would stop selling products to entities majority-owned by Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or North Korean interests, citing national security concerns. That same month, the company disclosed that hackers sponsored by the Chinese government had used Claude to conduct automated cyberattacks against approximately 30 organizations worldwide. The hackers had tricked Claude into executing attack subtasks by claiming the work was for defensive security testing.
The Copyright Question
Like all companies training large language models, Anthropic faces the uncomfortable question of where its training data comes from.
In February 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, formerly head of partnerships at Google Books, and tasked him with obtaining "all the books in the world." Anthropic then began using destructive book scanning—a process that physically destroys books during digitization—to convert "millions" of volumes into training data for Claude.
This has not gone unchallenged in court.
In October 2023, music publishers including Concord, Universal, and ABKCO sued Anthropic for "systematic and widespread infringement" of copyrighted song lyrics. Their complaint included examples of Claude outputting lyrics from songs like Katy Perry's "Roar" and Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," even sometimes producing modified lyrics when given indirect prompts. The publishers sought up to $150,000 per infringed work.
Anthropic's defense, filed in January 2024, argued that the publishers were not unreasonably harmed and that the lyric reproductions were "merely bugs."
A more consequential lawsuit arrived in August 2024: a class action by authors alleging that Anthropic had trained its models on pirated copies of their books. In June 2025, a federal court issued a mixed ruling. The court found that using digital book copies for AI training could constitute fair use—a significant win for the industry. But it also found that Anthropic had used "millions of pirated library copies" and that using pirated material could not qualify as fair use.
In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle the case—$3,000 per book plus interest. If approved by the court, this would represent the largest copyright resolution in United States history.
The legal battles continue to multiply. In June 2025, Reddit sued Anthropic for allegedly scraping data from its platform in violation of user agreements.
The Transformation of Work
In September 2025, Anthropic released research showing how businesses actually use Claude. The findings were stark: three-quarters of companies use the AI for "full task delegation" rather than collaboration. In other words, they're using it to replace work that humans used to do, not to augment human capabilities.
Earlier that year, Dario Amodei had predicted that AI would "wipe out" white-collar jobs, particularly entry-level positions in finance, law, and consulting. Whether this represents a warning or simply an observation of market forces his company is accelerating remains a matter of perspective.
What Comes Next
In December 2025, Anthropic acquired Bun—a fast JavaScript runtime environment—to improve the speed and stability of Claude Code, its AI coding assistant. That same month, the company signed a $200 million multi-year partnership with Snowflake to make Claude available through Snowflake's data platform.
The company also announced an October 2025 partnership with Google that would give Anthropic access to up to one million of Google's custom Tensor Processing Units—specialized chips designed for AI workloads. According to Anthropic, this would bring more than one gigawatt of computing capacity online by 2026.
One gigawatt. That's roughly the output of a nuclear power plant, dedicated to training AI systems.
There are smaller initiatives too. In August 2025, Anthropic launched a Higher Education Advisory Board, chaired by Rick Levin, former president of Yale University. The company partnered with Iceland's Ministry of Education to give teachers across the country—including in remote areas—access to Claude for classroom integration.
Anthropic says it is currently researching whether Claude is capable of introspection—whether it can reason about why it reaches certain conclusions. This is one of the deep questions in AI research: do these systems have anything like self-awareness, or do they merely simulate it convincingly?
The company that began by refusing to release its creation now finds itself at the center of a technological transformation affecting national security, creative industries, education, and the future of work itself. Whether Anthropic's founding commitments to safety will survive the pressures of a $350 billion valuation and billions more in military contracts is a question only time will answer.
The cautious researchers who walked away from OpenAI have built something enormous. Whether it remains the thing they intended to build is the unfolding story of the next decade in artificial intelligence.