Anthropic

Anthropic PBC is a U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) public-benefit startup founded in 2021. It researches and develops AI to "study their safety properties at the technological frontier" and use this research to deploy safe, reliable models for the public. Anthropic has developed a family of large language models (LLMs) named Claude as a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

Anthropic was founded by former members of OpenAI, siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei. In September 2023, Amazon announced an investment of up to $4 billion, followed by a $2 billion commitment from Google in the following month.

History

Established in 2021, Anthropic was co-founded by seven former OpenAI employees, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, who previously held the position of Vice President of Research at OpenAI.

By April 2022, Anthropic had secured $580 million in funding, with $500 million of this amount contributed by FTX led by Sam Bankman-Fried.

During the summer of 2022, Anthropic completed the training of the initial version of Claude but opted not to release it, citing the necessity for additional internal safety assessments and the intention to prevent a potentially dangerous competition in the development of more advanced AI systems.

In February 2023, Anthropic faced a lawsuit from Anthrop LLC, a Texas-based company, over the use of the trademark "Anthropic A.I." Later, on September 25, 2023, Amazon and Anthropic announced a partnership, with Amazon becoming a minority stakeholder through an initial investment of $1.25 billion, with plans for a total investment of $4 billion.

As part of the agreement, Anthropic agreed to utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its main cloud provider and to offer its AI models to AWS customers. The following month, Google also invested $500 million in Anthropic and committed to an additional $1.5 billion over time.

In March 2024, Amazon fulfilled its investment commitment from the previous year by injecting an additional $2.75 billion into Anthropic, reaching the total $4 billion investment.

Throughout 2024, Anthropic managed to attract several prominent employees from OpenAI, including Jan Leike, John Schulman, and Durk Kingma.