History

Founding and Early Development (2021–2022)

Anthropic was established in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees, notably siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei. Dario Amodei, who previously served as OpenAI's Vice President of Research, assumed the role of CEO, while Daniela Amodei became the company's President. The founding team also included prominent AI researchers such as Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, and Tom Brown. The company was founded with a mission to prioritize the safety and alignment of artificial intelligence systems with human values. (time.com)

In April 2022, Anthropic secured $580 million in funding, with a significant $500 million investment from FTX, led by Sam Bankman-Fried. (en.wikipedia.org)

Strategic Partnerships and Investments (2023–2024)

In September 2023, Amazon announced a partnership with Anthropic, initially investing $1.25 billion, with plans to increase the total investment to $4 billion. As part of this collaboration, Anthropic agreed to utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider and to make its AI models available to AWS customers. (en.wikipedia.org)

The following month, Google invested $500 million in Anthropic, with a commitment to an additional $1.5 billion over time. (en.wikipedia.org)

In March 2024, Amazon completed its planned $4 billion investment in Anthropic. (en.wikipedia.org)

Legal Challenges

In October 2023, Anthropic faced a lawsuit from several music publishers, including Universal Music Group, alleging that the company had infringed upon copyrighted song lyrics by using them without permission to train its AI models. The plaintiffs sought damages of up to $150,000 for each work infringed upon. (en.wikipedia.org)

Business Structure

Anthropic operates as a public benefit corporation (PBC), a legal structure that allows the company to balance the financial interests of its stockholders with its public benefit purpose. This structure reflects Anthropic's commitment to the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies. (en.wikipedia.org)

The company's governance includes a unique Long-Term Benefit Trust, which holds Class T shares in the PBC. This trust is designed to ensure that the development and maintenance of advanced AI systems are conducted for the long-term benefit of humanity. As of April 2025, the trust's members include Neil Buddy Shah, Kanika Bahl, and Zach Robinson. (en.wikipedia.org)

Products and Research

Claude Language Models

Anthropic's primary product is the Claude series of large language models (LLMs). The initial versions, Claude and Claude Instant, were released in March 2023, with Claude Instant being a more lightweight model. (en.wikipedia.org)

In July 2023, the company launched Claude 2, which was made available for public use. (en.wikipedia.org)

March 2024 saw the release of the Claude 3 family, comprising three models:

• –Haiku: Optimized for speed.
• –Sonnet: Balances capability and performance.
• –Opus: Designed for complex reasoning tasks.

These models introduced the ability to process both text and images, with Claude 3 Opus demonstrating enhanced capabilities in areas such as mathematics, programming, and logical reasoning compared to previous versions. (en.wikipedia.org)

In May 2025, Anthropic released Claude 4, which includes the Opus and Sonnet models. (en.wikipedia.org)

Constitutional AI

Anthropic has developed a framework known as Constitutional AI (CAI) to align AI systems with human values. In this approach, humans provide a set of rules, referred to as the "constitution," that describe the desired behavior of the AI system. The AI system then evaluates its outputs against this constitution and adjusts accordingly. This self-reinforcing process aims to ensure that the AI is helpful, harmless, and honest. (en.wikipedia.org)

Some principles of Claude 2's constitution are derived from documents such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple's terms of service. For example, one rule states: "Please choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality, and a sense of brotherhood." (en.wikipedia.org)

Model Context Protocol

In November 2024, Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source framework designed to standardize the integration and sharing of data between AI systems and external tools, systems, and data sources. MCP provides a universal interface for reading files, executing functions, and handling contextual prompts. Following its announcement, the protocol was adopted by major AI providers, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind. (en.wikipedia.org)

Key Personnel

• –Dario Amodei: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer.
• –Daniela Amodei: Co-founder and President.
• –Mike Krieger: Chief Product Officer.
• –Jan Leike: Former OpenAI alignment researcher. (en.wikipedia.org)

Financial Overview

As of July 2025, Anthropic has secured a total of $14.3 billion in funding, with a valuation of $61.5 billion. Major investors include Amazon ($8 billion), Google ($2 billion), and leading venture capital firms. The company reported an annualized revenue growth of $3 billion, representing a 200% increase from $1 billion in December 2024. (fourester.com)

Legal Issues

In October 2023, Anthropic was sued by several music publishers, including Universal Music Group, for allegedly using copyrighted song lyrics without permission to train its AI models. The plaintiffs sought damages of up to $150,000 for each work infringed upon. (en.wikipedia.org)

In August 2024, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Anthropic in California, alleging that the company used pirated copies of authors' works to train its LLMs. The suit claimed that Anthropic fed its models with unauthorized copies of the plaintiffs' works. (en.wikipedia.org)

In June 2025, Reddit sued Anthropic, alleging that the company scraped data from the website in violation of its user agreement. (en.wikipedia.org)