Anthropic is an artificial intelligence company and the developer of Claude, a set of Large Language Models powering the company's AI chatbot of the same name. In 2021, wanting to be more safety-oriented and better understand how models make decisions, siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei left OpenAI to co-found Anthropic alongside five other former employees. As a public benefit corporation, it has promoted the responsible development of AI for the long-term good of humanity.
Rather than relying solely on human feedback to improve Claude, Anthropic introduced constitutional AI. This approach enables AI systems to self-critique and revise their outputs in accordance with a codified set of principles to reduce potential harm. The company also invented the Model Context Protocol, a standardized method for connecting LLMs to external data and tools, enhancing these models' capabilities and helping clear the way for AI agents.
As of early 2026, Anthropic's partnerships with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have made Claude the only advanced, large-scale LLM natively available across all three cloud service providers. Despite controversies over its use of copyrighted material to train AI, Claude's use in cyberattacks, and disputes with the Pentagon over mass surveillance, these partnerships and additional enterprise adoption have brought Anthropic's valuation to $380B as of February 2026.
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Founded by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic envisioned guardrails in its AI products from the outset to minimize the potential risk for businesses considering using its Claude products. The strategy has contributed to a tenfold increase in revenue over three consecutive years, and its business customer base has grown from under 1,000 to over 300,000 in two years.
Since March 2024, the Claude series of large language models includes three varieties—Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus—named to metaphorically illustrate increasing complexity and computing power. Claude Code can perform software engineering tasks for developers and, as of January 2026, writes nearly all of Anthropic's code alongside Opus 4.5.
By incorporating elements from documents such as the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights into a framework against which it can check its outputs, Anthropic hopes the approach will help Claude operate with good human values and behaviors beyond what human-driven training alone can provide.
Amanda Askell's work focuses on the behavior and values reflected in Claude, the company's AI chatbot, and how its character can better align with how the "ideal person" would act in Claude's position. She also emphasizes the importance of humans being ethical in their interactions with current models, from which future ones will be built.
Known as the father of information theory, Claude Shannon applied Boolean algebra—a subset of mathematics that quantifies true or false statements as 1 or 0, respectively—to circuit design to develop the concept of a binary digit. His paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1948) laid the groundwork for all modern digital systems.
Developed by Anthropic, the open-source software serves as an integration layer that standardizes how large language models connect to real-time information sources or tools. Just as a USB-C port serves as a universal standard for many peripherals, MCP streamlines these integrations and provides context about external sources to LLMs in a way that AI can understand.
As a stress test of its large language models, a version of Claude—Claudius—managed the device as a small business for a month to identify potential challenges to AI business automation. Through successive prompts, Claudius was convinced to give away items for free to combat capitalism and to stock up on previously prohibited items, such as a PlayStation 5.
The online courses include Claude Code in Action, which teaches software developers how to integrate Claude Code into existing workflows; Claude 101, to learn how Claude can be used to complete everyday tasks; and an AI Fluency series to help educators, instructional designers, and students learn to apply AI in academic settings.
Anthropic cut the bindings from purchased books and discarded them after scanning to rapidly collect high-quality text at low cost for training Claude. This, despite hiring the former head of partnerships for the Google Books project, which nondestructively scanned millions of books borrowed from libraries before returning them.
As of December 2025, Claude Code—Anthropic's AI-powered coding assistant—accounts for 54% of the enterprise coding market, and, while subjective, some report that Claude provides more natural-sounding writing. However, ChatGPT can create images and videos, not just generate text, and provides a broader set of applications via custom GPTs.
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