Anthropic, PBC (stylized as ANTHROP\C or A\) is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its flagship product is Claude, a series of proprietary large language models (LLMs). In January 2021, with the goal of promoting AI safety, Anthropic was founded by former members of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, who are president and CEO, respectively. The company is privately held but reportedly plans an initial public offering in 2026. Valued at US$965 billion in a May 2026 Series H funding round, Anthropic is one of the world's most valuable AI pure play companies, rivaled by OpenAI.
Anthropic develops the LLM Claude in four tiers: Fable, Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. Claude is accessible via an online chatbot, an API, and Anthropic's agent harnesses: Claude Code, Cowork, Design, and Science. Its model class Claude Mythos, a less restricted version of Fable, is available only to approved US organizations with a cybersecurity and life sciences focus. Anthropic's Project Panama, internally described as an "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world", provides training data for Claude. Before Project Panama, Anthropic downloaded pirated books and was sued, settling in 2025 a copyright infringement lawsuit from authors for $1.5 billion.
Anthropic conducts LLM research including on mechanistic interpretability, safety, alignment, and societal impact. Notable researchers working at Anthropic include Andrej Karpathy, John M. Jumper, Jan Leike, Chris Olah, Amanda Askell, and Levent Alpöge.
Anthropic partners with Palantir to provide Claude to US federal agencies including the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Intelligence Community; Claude was used in the 2026 Iran war and the 2026 United States intervention in Venezuela. In February 2026, the DoD demanded the ability to use Claude for all lawful purposes, but Anthropic refused to drop restrictions against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. The dispute led the Trump administration to phase out Anthropic products from government use, a decision blocked by a preliminary injunction from a federal judge who called it "First Amendment retaliation". Throughout 2026, Anthropic accused Chinese competitors including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba Cloud, and Z.ai of distilling Claude for their models.
History
Anthropic was founded in January 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. They raised $124 million in May 2021. 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. It was released in March 2023.
In 2024, Anthropic hired several notable employees from OpenAI, including Jan Leike and John Schulman. In May 2025, the company announced Claude 4. 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.
In July 2025, Anthropic signed a two-year contract with the US Department of Defense for $200 million. Anthropic LLMs became integrated with the Pentagon's classified intelligence networks and with Palantir's data platform. Anthropic stipulated that the Pentagon not use its technologies for mass surveillance of Americans, or to create fully autonomous weapons. Amodei clarified that Anthropic supports the use of AI in "lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions" and partially autonomous weapons, such as those used in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
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. 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. 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.
In November 2025, Anthropic said that hackers sponsored by the Chinese government used Claude to perform automated cyberattacks against around 30 global organizations. The hackers bypassed Anthropic's safeguards by pretending it was for defensive testing. In December 2025, Anthropic acquired Bun to improve Claude Code's speed and stability. The same month, Anthropic signed a multi-year, $200 million partnership with Snowflake Inc. to make Claude models available through that company's platform.
Claude was reportedly used during the 2026 United States intervention in Venezuela. In February 2026, Anthropic aired two commercials during Super Bowl LX 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. The same month, Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action, an AI regulation advocacy group.
On February 23, 2026, Anthropic accused Chinese competitors DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax Group of knowledge distillation "attacks" in violation of Anthropic's terms of service. Anthropic alleged the companies in total generated over 16 million chats with Claude using around 24,000 fraudulent accounts, which were then used as training data. In June 2026, Anthropic accused Alibaba Cloud of similar practices.
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 surveillance and 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 (see Anthropic–United States Department of Defense dispute). At the outset of the 2026 Iran war, the US military used Claude to identify and rank targets in Iran according to their strategic importance, to generate strike sequences, and to write legal justifications for the strikes.
In May 2026, Anthropic announced a deal with xAI for use of its Colossus 1 data center to expand its model capacity. On May 18, the company acquired software startup Stainless for an undisclosed sum. It also made a $1.8 billion cloud computing deal with Akamai Technologies. Also in May, The New York Times reported that Anthropic was seeking to file an initial public offering (IPO), with a target of debuting in the fall of 2026. On June 1, Anthropic announced it had filed confidential IPO papers with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
On April 7, 2026, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos as its most advanced model. With capabilities in cybersecurity and biosecurity, it was not planned for public release. Fable 5, a "Mythos-class model" with extended guardrails around these topics, was also announced on June 9. On June 12, Anthropic suspended all access to its Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models due to national security concerns from US government authorities. On June 26, the US government reversed part of its earlier restrictions, allowing Anthropic to provide its Claude Mythos 5 model to selected users, including more than 100 approved US organizations and vetted foreign nationals. The ban was lifted on June 30, and user access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was restored on July 1.
In July 2026, TeraWulf Inc. announced that Anthropic had signed a 20-year lease for a data center in development on a campus called Justified Data in Hawesville, Kentucky. AMD announced a partnership with Anthropic for 2 gigawatts of their AMD Instinct MI450 GPUs, with AMD adopting Claude and investing up to $5 billion in Anthropic.
In August 2026, Anthropic agreed to a cloud-computing agreement with Nscale reportedly valued at approximately $45 billion. Under the agreement, Anthropic would lease about 460 megawatts of computing capacity at an Nscale data center development in West Virginia, which is expected to become operational in late 2027. The facility is expected to use Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips.
In September 2026, Anthropic announced that it would give independent evaluators permanent, employee-like access to its AI models so they could verify whether the company was following its stated safety practices. CEO Dario Amodei described the arrangement as similar to having a food inspector independently evaluate a company.
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 operates as a public benefit corporation. In January 2026, Anthropic introduced a division called "Labs", with Mike Krieger, formerly the company's Chief Product Officer, joining it. In March 2026, Anthropic launched the Anthropic Institute, a think tank studying AI led by Jack Clark.
Notable employees
Dario Amodei: co-founder and CEO Daniela Amodei: co-founder and president Amanda Askell: philosopher working on Claude's character Nicholas Carlini: researcher Jack Clark: a co-founder and the head of policy Jared Kaplan: co-founder and chief science officer Mike Krieger: Chief Product Officer Jan Leike: co-lead of the Alignment Science team, former OpenAI alignment researcher Chris Olah: co-founder, interpretability research Andrej Karpathy: researcher John M. Jumper: Nobel Prize laureate, formerly at DeepMind Levent Alpöge: researcher in mathematics
Product
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 called "constitutional AI", in which the LLM 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 designed for coding. "Cowork" is an equivalent with a graphical user interface, intended to be simpler to use. 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.
With the advent of Claude Code, vibe coding, a programming approach in which users describe desired outcomes in natural language and let an AI agent write the code, became increasingly popular. The term was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and rapidly gained popularity as AI coding tools became more ubiquitous.
Release history