What is Anthropic?
Anthropic is an AI safety company that created Claude, a conversational AI assistant. Founded by former OpenAI researchers, it focuses on developing AI systems that are safe, beneficial, and understandable.
Safety First
Anthropic's core focus is making AI safe. They believe AI could be transformative and potentially dangerous, so getting safety right is crucial.
History
2021: Founding
Founded by Dario Amodei (CEO) and Daniela Amodei (President), along with other former OpenAI employees. They left over disagreements about safety priorities.
2022-2023: Growth
Released Claude, raised billions in funding. Google invested $300M, then $2B more. Amazon invested up to $4B.
2024: Claude 3
Released Claude 3 family (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku). Claude 3 Opus matched or exceeded GPT-4 on many benchmarks.
Products
- Claude — Conversational AI assistant (direct competitor to ChatGPT)
- Claude API — For developers to build applications
- Claude for Enterprise — Business-focused offering
What Makes Anthropic Different
Constitutional AI
Their approach to training AI with explicit principles. The AI is trained to follow a "constitution" of rules about helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty.
Safety Research
Heavy focus on understanding how AI models work internally, making them more interpretable and predictable.
Responsible Scaling
Commitments to pause development if safety concerns arise, with clear policies for when to proceed.
Claude vs. ChatGPT
- Length — Claude can process much longer documents (200K tokens)
- Tone — Often considered more conversational and nuanced
- Refusals — Different approaches to content policies
- Reasoning — Strong at complex analysis and coding
Funding
- Google — $2+ billion
- Amazon — Up to $4 billion
- Spark Capital, others — Additional funding
- Valuation — $20+ billion (2024)
Summary
- • Anthropic created Claude, focusing on AI safety
- • Founded by former OpenAI researchers in 2021
- • Uses Constitutional AI for safer model training
- • Major backing from Google and Amazon