Anthropic

Anthropic is an artificial intelligence research and development company founded in 2021. The company's stated mission is to responsibly advance the field of generative artificial intelligence by delivering safe and reliable AI models to the public.

Founding and History

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI vice presidents and siblings Dario Amodei (CEO) and Daniela Amodei (President). Before founding Anthropic, Dario Amodei served as Vice President of Research at OpenAI. The company was established in San Francisco by Dario Amodei, Jared Kaplan, Benjamin Mann, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, and Sam McCandlish.

The company's founding purpose is to conduct research in the public interest on making AI more reliable and interpretable. Anthropic is positioned as a company that conducts pioneering work in AI safety, aiming to develop powerful AI systems through responsible innovation.

Anthropic is a Series E company that has raised $14.3 billion in funding. In September 2023, Amazon announced an investment of up to $4 billion, followed by a $2 billion commitment from Google the following month. The company was valued at $4.1 billion at the beginning of 2023.

Claude AI Models

Anthropic's main product is Claude, an AI assistant designed for various tasks. Claude models are developed as a model family offering different performance and cost balances.

Claude 3 Series

The Claude 3 model family includes three state-of-the-art models that set new industry standards across a broad range of cognitive tasks: Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus, in order of increasing capability.

Claude 3 Haiku: The lightest model focused on speed and cost efficiency, optimized for basic tasks.

Claude 3 Sonnet: A reliable, balanced option offering strong performance and speed. Ideal for general use.

Claude 3 Opus: The most suitable model for complex reasoning, advanced coding, detailed analysis, and accuracy-critical tasks. Opus, which is the default version of Claude 3, has a context window of 200,000 tokens, but this is extended to 1 million for specific use cases.

Claude 3.5 Series

The Claude 3.5 model family includes significant improvements compared to the previous Claude 3 series.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet: The enhanced version shows broad improvements in industry benchmark tests. It has made strong advances particularly in agentic coding and tool use tasks. Its coding performance has increased from 33.4% to 49.0% on the SWE-bench Verified test, scoring higher than all publicly available models, including reasoning models like OpenAI o1-preview and specialized systems designed for agentic coding. It also showed performance improvement from 62.6% to 69.2% in the retail domain on the TAU-bench agentic tool use task.

Claude 3.5 Haiku: Released on November 5, 2024, this model supports context windows up to 200,000 tokens. It can generate up to 8,192 tokens of output in a single response. The model's knowledge cutoff date is July 1, 2024. It continues to be the lightest model focused on speed and cost efficiency.

Claude 4 Series

Claude 4 offers breakthrough AI capabilities that provide a more reliable, interpretable assistance experience for complex tasks throughout work and learning. This series currently includes Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 models.

Claude Sonnet 4: Described as a smart and efficient model for everyday use.

Claude Opus 4: Offers premium performance with pricing of $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens.

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Model Context Protocol is an open standard that enables developers to create secure, bidirectional connections between data sources and AI-powered tools. This standard, called MCP, can help AI models generate better, more relevant responses to queries.

MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to large language models (LLMs). You can think of MCP as like a USB-C port for AI applications. This protocol enables seamless integration between large language model applications and external data sources and tools.

The architecture is quite simple: developers can expose their data through MCP servers or build AI applications (MCP clients).

Research Areas and Security-Focused Approach

Anthropic's research includes natural language processing, human feedback, scaling laws, reinforcement learning, code generation, and interpretability. The company develops AI systems that prioritize safety.

Constitutional AI

One of Anthropic's most important research contributions is the Constitutional AI (CAI) method. This approach aims to ensure the harmlessness of AI systems without human labeling, solely through a list of rules or principles. Constitutional AI is a technique widely used in Claude models and is one of the earliest examples of large-scale use of synthetic data for RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) training.

This approach has two stages: In the first stage, AI improves itself by generating and revising its own outputs; in the second stage, AI learns from AI feedback. The Constitutional AI method includes critiques of instruction data regarding adherence to a set of principles and ensures that AI systems behave more safely and compliantly.

AI Safety Research

Anthropic positions itself as an AI safety and research company working to build trustworthy, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The company's security-focused approach aims to ensure that AI systems are used for the benefit of humanity. In this context, the company conducts work on techniques such as debate, scaling automated red team attacks, Constitutional AI, bias mitigation, and RLHF.

Company Structure and Valuation

Anthropic was valued at $4.1 billion at the beginning of 2023, and in October 2023, CNBC confirmed Google's $2 billion investment with the company. The AI company has not yet officially confirmed plans to go public.