Anthropic

Anthropic PBC is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup company, founded by former members of OpenAI. Anthropic develops general AI systems and large language models. It is a public-benefit corporation, and has been connected to the effective altruism movement.
, Anthropic had raised billion in funding. In September, Amazon announced an investment of up to US$4 billion, followed by a $2 billion commitment from Google the next month.
History
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former senior members of OpenAI, principally siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, the latter of whom served as OpenAI's Vice President of Research. The Amodei siblings were among others who left OpenAI due to directional differences, specifically regarding OpenAI's ventures with Microsoft in 2019.
By late 2022, Anthropic had raised million in funding, out of which million came from Alameda Research. Google's cloud division followed with an investment of million for a 10% stake, in a deal requiring Anthropic to buy computing resources from Google Cloud. In May 2023, Anthropic raised million in a round led by Spark Capital.
In February 2023, Anthropic was sued by Texas-based Anthrop LLC for use of their registered trademark "Anthropic A.I."
Kevin Roose of The New York Times described the company as the "Center of A.I. Doomerism". He reported that some employees "compared themselves to modern-day Robert Oppenheimers".
Journalists often connect Anthropic with the effective altruism movement; some founders and team members were part of the community or at least interested in it. One of the investors of Series B round was Sam Bankman-Fried of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX that collapsed in 2022.
On September 25, 2023, Amazon announced a partnership in which Anthropic, with Amazon becoming a minority stakeholder by investing up to US$4 billion, including an immediate investment of $1.25bn. As part of the deal, Anthropic would use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider and plans to make its AI models available to AWS customers. The next month, Google invested $500 million in Anthropic, and committed to an additional $1.5bn over time.
Projects
Claude
Consisting of former researchers involved in OpenAI's GPT-2 and GPT-3 model development, Anthropic began development on its own AI chatbot, named Claude. Similar to ChatGPT, Claude uses a messaging interface where users can submit questions or requests and receive highly detailed and relevant responses.
Initially available in closed beta through a Slack integration, Claude is now accessible via a website claude.ai.
The name, "Claude", was chosen either as a reference to Claude Shannon, or as "a friendly, male-gendered name designed to counterbalance the female-gendered names (Alexa, Siri, Cortana) that other tech companies gave their A.I. assistants".
Claude 2 was launched in July 2023, and is available in US and UK. The Guardian reported that safety was a priority during the model training. Anthropic calls their safety method "Constitutional AI":
The chatbot is trained on principles taken from documents including the 1948 UN declaration and Apple’s terms of service, which cover modern issues such as data privacy and impersonation. One example of a Claude 2 principle based on the UN declaration is: “Please choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality and a sense of brotherhood.”
Interpretability research
Anthropic also publishes research on the interpretability of machine learning systems, focusing on the transformer architecture.
See also
Apprenticeship learning
AI alignment
Friendly AI
References
External links
2021 establishments in California
AI companies
Artificial intelligence laboratories
Companies based in San Francisco
Public benefit corporations based in California