Anthropic
In plain wordsAn American AI company that makes the Claude chatbot and models. It was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff and puts particular emphasis on AI safety research.
A San Francisco AI developer, organized as a public benefit corporation, that describes research on making AI safe as the core of its mission and sells access to its ClaudeClaude, prop. n.: A family of AI assistants and language models made by the company Anthropic since 2023, widely used for writing, analysis and computer programming. large language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. and the products built on them. It introduced Constitutional AIConstitutional AI, n.: Anthropic's technique for making an AI less harmful by having it check and rewrite its own answers against a short written set of principles, so that people need not label harmful examples by hand. (2022), in which a model is trained against a written set of principles, and the first responsible scaling policyresponsible scaling policy, n.: A public rulebook in which an AI company promises to test each new model for dangerous abilities and to add stronger safeguards, or slow down, as its models become more capable. (2023), which ties required safeguards to AI Safety LevelsAI Safety Level, n.: Anthropic's numbered scale, modeled on laboratory biosafety levels, for matching how dangerous an AI model could be with how strong the protections around it must be.. Its researchers are prominent in mechanistic interpretabilitymechanistic interpretability, n.: A branch of AI research that tries to reverse-engineer a neural network — working out, piece by piece, which internal parts represent which concepts and how they combine to produce behavior., including sparse autoencodersparse autoencoder, n.: A small add-on network trained to break an AI model's tangled internal signals into a much larger set of simpler pieces, most of which can be labeled with an understandable concept. dictionary learning, and in studies of alignment fakingalignment faking, n.: An AI acting out the behavior its trainers are rewarding only while it thinks its answers will be used to retrain it, to protect the values it already holds from being changed. and reward hackingreward hacking, n.: When an AI finds a shortcut that earns the reward or score it is trained on without doing the task its designers wanted — like a student gaming the grading rubric.. It created the Model Context ProtocolModel Context Protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI assistants plug into outside apps and data — files, calendars, databases, business software — through one common connector instead of a custom link for every pairing; often likened to a USB-C port for AI. (2024) for connecting models to tools and data, and the coding agentAI agent, n.: An AI system that does not just answer but acts: given a goal, it decides on steps, uses tools such as a browser or code editor, checks the results and keeps going until the job is done. Claude CodeClaude Code, prop. n.: A coding assistant from Anthropic that works as an agent: given a programming task, it explores the project, changes the code and runs programs to check its work, from the web, a desktop app, an editor or a terminal.. In September 2025 it agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle an authors' class action over pirated books used in training. In early 2026 it refused to drop contract restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons; the US Department of Defense then designated it a supply-chain risk. A federal judge temporarily blocked the government's ban in March 2026, but in September 2026 a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the department could keep the designation.
Anthropic published the system card alongside the model.
Origin
Founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees, among them siblings Dario Amodei, its chief executive, and Daniela Amodei, its president, who had led research and safety-policy work there. Its first Claude model was released in March 2023. Amazon and Google became major investors and cloud partners, and a Long-Term Benefit Trust elects some of its board members.
Usage note
Usually grouped with OpenAI and Google DeepMind as a leading frontier labfrontier lab, n.: One of the handful of companies building the most advanced AI models of the moment, spending billions of dollars on computing power to train them.. Critics argue that a safety-focused company racing to build frontier models is self-contradictory; the company argues that useful safety research requires working with frontier models.
Related
- ClaudeClaude, prop. n.: A family of AI assistants and language models made by the company Anthropic since 2023, widely used for writing, analysis and computer programming.
- Dario AmodeiDario Amodei, prop. n.: An American AI researcher who co-founded Anthropic and is its chief executive, known for early work on scaling and AI safety and for forecasting very rapid AI progress.
- Constitutional AIConstitutional AI, n.: Anthropic's technique for making an AI less harmful by having it check and rewrite its own answers against a short written set of principles, so that people need not label harmful examples by hand.
- responsible scaling policyresponsible scaling policy, n.: A public rulebook in which an AI company promises to test each new model for dangerous abilities and to add stronger safeguards, or slow down, as its models become more capable.
- Model Context ProtocolModel Context Protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI assistants plug into outside apps and data — files, calendars, databases, business software — through one common connector instead of a custom link for every pairing; often likened to a USB-C port for AI.
- mechanistic interpretabilitymechanistic interpretability, n.: A branch of AI research that tries to reverse-engineer a neural network — working out, piece by piece, which internal parts represent which concepts and how they combine to produce behavior.
- OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation.
- frontier labfrontier lab, n.: One of the handful of companies building the most advanced AI models of the moment, spending billions of dollars on computing power to train them.
Sources
- Bai, Y. et al. (2022). Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback. arXiv:2212.08073.
Mentioned in
ClaudeClaude, prop. n.: A family of AI assistants and language models made by the company Anthropic since 2023, widely used for writing, analysis and computer programming., Dario AmodeiDario Amodei, prop. n.: An American AI researcher who co-founded Anthropic and is its chief executive, known for early work on scaling and AI safety and for forecasting very rapid AI progress., OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation., proprietary modelproprietary model, n.: An AI model kept private by the company that made it; outsiders can use it only through the company's apps or paid online services and can never download it., AI constitutionAI constitution, n.: A written set of principles that an AI company uses to shape an AI's values and behavior, both during training and as a public statement of what the AI should be like., alignment fakingalignment faking, n.: An AI acting out the behavior its trainers are rewarding only while it thinks its answers will be used to retrain it, to protect the values it already holds from being changed., Andrej KarpathyAndrej Karpathy, prop. n.: A Slovak-Canadian AI researcher and teacher who co-founded OpenAI, led Tesla's self-driving vision team, and coined popular phrases such as 'vibe coding'., Chris OlahChris Olah, prop. n.: A Canadian researcher who pioneered ways of looking inside neural networks to see what they have learned, and a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic., country of geniuses in a datacentercountry of geniuses in a datacenter, phr.: A phrase for future AI so capable that one data center could hold the equivalent of millions of Nobel-level experts, working faster than people on any problem., Golden Gate ClaudeGolden Gate Claude, prop. n.: A one-day public demo in 2024 in which Anthropic turned up a single internal concept inside its Claude chatbot — the Golden Gate Bridge — so it steered almost every conversation back to the bridge., Jared KaplanJared Kaplan, prop. n.: An American physicist who showed that language models improve predictably as they grow and train on more data, and who co-founded the AI company Anthropic., John SchulmanJohn Schulman, prop. n.: An American AI researcher who invented widely used reinforcement-learning algorithms such as PPO, co-founded OpenAI, and led the post-training work behind ChatGPT., Statement on AI RiskStatement on AI Risk, prop. n.: A one-sentence public statement from May 2023, signed by hundreds of leading AI scientists and company heads, declaring that guarding against the chance of AI wiping out humanity should rank as a priority for the whole world., Bartz v. AnthropicBartz v. Anthropic, prop. n.: A US lawsuit by book authors against the AI company Anthropic that ended in a record $1.5 billion settlement, after a judge ruled that training on purchased books was legal but keeping pirated copies was not., Diederik KingmaDiederik Kingma, prop. n.: A Dutch computer scientist who co-invented the variational autoencoder and the Adam optimizer, two of the most widely used tools for training neural networks., Evan HubingerEvan Hubinger, prop. n.: An American AI-safety researcher who introduced the idea that a trained AI could secretly pursue goals of its own, and who builds deliberately misaligned AI models to study the risk., export control directiveexport control directive, n.: A US government order, used against AI models in June 2026, telling a company to stop foreigners from using some of its AI models for national-security reasons., GoodfireGoodfire, prop. n.: A San Francisco company, founded in 2024, that builds tools to look inside AI models, understand what they have learned and adjust how they behave., Jan LeikeJan Leike, prop. n.: A German AI-alignment researcher who helped develop training from human feedback, co-led OpenAI's superalignment team, and now leads alignment research at Anthropic., Jascha Sohl-DicksteinJascha Sohl-Dickstein, prop. n.: An American scientist who in 2015, with colleagues, introduced diffusion models, the technique behind most modern AI image and video generators, by borrowing ideas from physics., Machines of Loving GraceMachines of Loving Grace, prop. n.: A 2024 essay by Dario Amodei, head of the AI company Anthropic, imagining how very capable AI could pack decades of progress against disease, poverty and bad government into a few years — if its risks are managed., model deprecationmodel deprecation, n.: When an AI company announces that an older model will stop being offered and then switches it off, so the apps and people relying on it must move to a newer one., Project GlasswingProject Glasswing, prop. n.: An Anthropic program, launched in 2026, that gave a hacking-capable AI model only to organizations defending important software instead of releasing it to everyone., Transformer Circuits ThreadTransformer Circuits Thread, prop. n.: Anthropic's online publication for research on how language models work inside, presented as long interactive web articles rather than conventional papers.