Anthropic is an AI safety and research company founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees. Incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation, it focuses on building AI systems that are reliable, interpretable, and steerable - qualities it treats as central to its research agenda rather than secondary concerns. The company employs around 3,000 people and is valued at approximately $183 billion.
Its primary product is Claude, a family of large language models designed to function as AI assistants while meeting the company's standards for safety, accuracy, and security. Claude is both a commercial product and a vehicle for Anthropic's broader research into how advanced AI systems can be made to behave predictably and in alignment with human intent.
Anthropic's technical work spans several intersecting fields:
- AI safety and alignment
- Large language model development
- Interpretability - understanding how and why models produce the outputs they do
- Steerability - making model behaviour responsive to human guidance
The company's stated mission is the responsible development of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. This is reflected in its Public Benefit Corporation structure, which formally embeds that obligation into its governance, alongside its commercial operations.
