Anthropic

Anthropic PBC
Founded	2021
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States
Key People	Dario Amodei, Chief Executive Officer; Daniela Amodei, President
Employees	Approximately 1,000
Products	Claude family of large language models; Claude Code; enterprise AI services
Website	https://www.anthropic.com
Releases	Company News
Blog	https://www.anthropic.com/news

Anthropic is an American artificial intelligence company that develops large language models and related artificial intelligence tools with a stated focus on building AI systems that are reliable, interpretable and steerable while operating at large scale in cloud and enterprise environments. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic developed the Claude family of AI models and associated developer tools that are accessed primarily through application programming interfaces (APIs) and cloud platforms. The company's models are used in a range of markets including financial services, technology, professional services and government.

Claude is Anthropic’s flagship AI chatbot. The company's AI-coding tool Claude Code became a viral hit in Silicon Valley and helped position Anthropic as a serious competitor to OpenAI.

On June 1, 2026, Anthropic, which was recently valued at nearly $1 trillion, said it had filed confidentially for an initial public offering, joining SpaceX and OpenAI in companies preparing to go public in 2026. Banks have told both Anthropic and OpenAI that whoever comes to market first will get first dibs on the large amounts of cash the banks are eager to deploy to back new AI companies. If both file initial paperwork with regulators around the same time, either would still have a chance to stage an offering before the other, according to a Wall Street Journal article.

History

Anthropic was founded in 2021 in San Francisco by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and a group of former OpenAI researchers who left over differences regarding strategy and governance for advanced AI systems. Early work focused on “constitutional AI,” a methodology for training language models using a set of written principles to guide behavior and reduce harmful outputs relative to earlier generations of large language models.

In 2022 and 2023, Anthropic released early versions of its Claude models to selected partners and then more broadly through API access, positioning the models as general-purpose assistants for tasks such as drafting, coding and analysis. During this period the company raised multiple funding rounds from technology companies, venture capital firms and strategic investors, including an agreement with Amazon that committed the company to use certain custom chips on Amazon Web Services infrastructure and made Claude available as a managed service to AWS customers. Anthropic also entered into partnerships with other cloud and hardware providers to secure access to high-performance computing resources needed to train and deploy increasingly large models.

By 2024, Anthropic had introduced successive generations of its Claude models, expanding context windows, coding capabilities and integration options as demand for generative AI systems grew. The company launched Claude Code, a terminal-based coding assistant aimed at software developers who wanted to run AI assistance within their local development environments. As its products matured, Anthropic expanded its customer base beyond early adopters to larger enterprises and government agencies that required contractual commitments around data handling, privacy and uptime.

From 2023 onward, Anthropic committed to large-scale investments in infrastructure inside the United States, announcing a multiyear plan to invest around $50 billion in computing facilities in states such as Texas and New York, in coordination with cloud and data-center partners. In 2026 Amazon announced that it would add up to $25 billion in incremental investment to an existing relationship with Anthropic in order to finance additional compute capacity, and Anthropic in turn committed to run its large language models on certain AWS custom chips for an extended period, tying the company more closely into cloud market infrastructure used by financial firms and other large institutions. Anthropic’s valuation increased significantly during this period.

Products & Services

Anthropic develops and operates the Claude family of large language models for tasks such as drafting, summarization, coding, research and conversational interaction. These models can be embedded into third-party platforms, including tools used in trading, risk, research and operations, where they assist with document analysis, report preparation and other processes that support risk management, compliance reviews and monitoring of anti-money laundering programs in financial institutions and asset managers.

The company offers Claude Code, a specialized tool for software development that connects to Anthropic’s models to provide code generation, refactoring and debugging assistance for languages commonly used in trading systems, market data processing and risk platforms. This service is used by engineering teams at financial firms to accelerate development of analytics and connectivity to exchanges such as CME Group and to post-trade and settlement systems without directly altering core match engine or time/price priority logic at those venues. Anthropic also provides enterprise support, service-level agreements and security features for customers integrating its models into regulated environments.

In capital markets and banking, customers use Claude to analyze disclosures, market commentary and structured data around instruments such as bond offerings, swaps, futures and options, and to support internal reporting on liquidity, price discovery, interest rate scenarios and VWAP execution quality, although trading decisions remain the responsibility of human portfolio managers and traders. Some institutions use the models to generate narratives around average daily volume, open interest and other market metrics, or to help interpret regulatory texts from authorities such as ESMA and U.S. agencies, integrating this analysis into banks’ documentation and asset managers’ portfolio oversight processes.

Anthropic launched a dedicated vertical offering called Claude for Financial Services in the summer of 2025. Its customers include Goldman Sachs, Citadel, Citi and AIG, the company said.

Anthropic's models are used around digital-asset markets, where clients may apply Claude to research on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In environmental and policy-related markets, participants who once interacted with platforms such as the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange (CCFE) have also explored large language models for analyzing regulatory developments, policy consultations and contract documentation related to emissions trading and climate-linked futures and options, sometimes using Anthropic’s tools as part of broader research.

Key People

Dario Amodei – Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of the Board

Daniela Amodei – Co-Founder, Director and President

Board of Directors: Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Yasmin Razavi, Jay Kreps, Reed Hastings, Chris Liddell, and Vas Narasimhan.

Controversies

Anthropic has been involved in legal and policy controversies related primarily to the training data used for its models and concerns about intellectual property and content provenance. In one notable case, a group of authors filed a copyright lawsuit alleging that Anthropic used their books without permission for training large language models, raising questions about how AI companies source data and compensate rights holders; the dispute led to a settlement in which Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to the authors, the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright cases. Supporters of the settlement argued that it provided a practical framework for resolving some copyright claims without prolonged litigation, while critics contended that it did not fully address the long-term implications of AI training on creative industries.

Anthropic has also faced scrutiny from policymakers regarding the use of its systems in government and defense settings. Claude was the AI model used by the U.S. government for more than a year and the first to be cleared for classified use. It was used in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. But on Feb. 27, 2026, the Trump Administration said it would designate the company a supply-chain risk to national security—the first time the U.S. has put that label on an American company. President Trump ordered the U.S. to stop using Anthropic’s software, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that any company doing business with the U.S. government would be barred from doing business with Anthropic. The military contract went to OpenAI, Anthropic’s rival, instead.

The proliferation of hacking attempts by rogue AI agents, as well as industry insiders' concerns about the risk of the technology, have increased pressure on the major AI companies and raised the prospect of stiffer regulation. In September 2026, two Anthropic researchers warned that rapidly progressing artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of the human race in ​the coming ten years.

Also in September 2026, Anthropic said it stopped attempts to use its Claude ​models to develop biological weapons and carry out a suspected Russia-linked cyber espionage campaign against Ukraine. It also accused Chinese ‌competitors of hacking attempts designed to clone Claude's capabilities.