About
Anthropic is a private research and product company focused on building safe, reliable, and steerable artificial intelligence. Founded in 2021 by researchers formerly from OpenAI, the company positions safety and alignment as the core design principle of its AI stack. The business concentrates on developing large language models that can assist with a range of tasks from drafting text to answering questions and programming assistance while embedding safety guardrails and governance frameworks to reduce risks such as harmful outputs, misalignment, and unintended behavior.
At the core of Anthropic's approach is the concept of constitutional AI and other alignment research. Constitutional AI tries to teach models to follow a set of explicitly defined rules (a "constitution") that guide how the model reasons and what it chooses to reveal or suppress. This research is meant to improve model safety without depending solely on post-hoc human feedback loops. The company publishes research papers and engages in safety testing, evaluation, and red-teaming to understand failure modes and refine safeguards. This emphasis on safety and governance is part of its brand and market positioning.
Anthropic develops Claude, a family of AI assistant models named after Claude Shannon, the pioneer of information theory. Claude is designed to be helpful, honest, and harmless, with emphasis on controllability and predictable behavior. Claude is offered through an API, allowing developers to integrate the assistant into software, customer support tools, content generation workflows, code assistance, data analysis prompts, and enterprise automation. The Claude API is pitched to businesses seeking a more controllable, safe AI alternative to general-purpose models. For larger customers, Anthropic offers enterprise-grade features, compliance, data governance, and dedicated support, with service-level agreements and private deployments where appropriate. While Claude-based solutions are the core offering, Anthropic also collaborates with partners to adapt and tune models to specific industries, regulatory regimes, or safety standards.
The business model combines research-driven product development with software as a service. Customers pay for API usage, including prompts, completions, and any model-specific features such as fine-tuning or domain adaptation where available. The pricing is typically tiered with usage-based fees, and larger enterprises may negotiate custom enterprise agreements, data handling terms, and on-site or hosted deployments in controlled environments. By licensing the Claude technology through the API, Anthropic earns revenue from compute usage, model access, and value-added features, rather than selling the model as a one-time product. The company emphasizes privacy and data handling practices, noting that customer data used to train or fine-tune models can be managed according to the customer’s preferences and contractual terms; in some cases, customers can opt out of data used for training. The underlying AI safety work is both a differentiator and a driver of long-term value, as organizations seek reliable, auditable AI systems for regulated domains such as finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure.
In addition to products, Anthropic positions itself as a research-first company. It publishes research and collaborates with the broader AI safety community, contributing to best practices, evaluation benchmarks, and tools for testing and aligning AI models. This helps them attract researchers, engineers, and enterprise customers who value responsible AI. Public information indicates the company has attracted significant venture funding to support its safety-focused mission, and it operates as a private company, not a publicly traded one. The combination of safety-centric research, a robust API-based product, and a focus on governing risk gives Anthropic a distinct profile in the AI ecosystem, alongside other AI providers that offer general-purpose models. The Claude line, with features like context-aware responses and governance controls, is positioned to serve sectors where reliability and policy compliance matter, such as compliance-heavy industries, customer support automation, and internal tooling. As the AI landscape evolves, Anthropic’s success will depend on its ability to scale safe, user-friendly AI while maintaining strong safety protocols and building trust with developers and customers.