The History of Anthropic

The History and Rise of Anthropic

In the early 2020s, as artificial intelligence (AI) began transitioning from experimental research into global commercial power, a group of visionary researchers and engineers made a remarkable decision that would shape the future of the industry. In 2021, Anthropic PBC was founded in San Francisco, California, USA by a cohort of former OpenAI scientists and engineers, led by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. Their choice to create a company with its core mission centered on AI safety and responsible AI deployment distinguished them early on from many competitors primarily focused on commercial scale or consumer products.

Origins and Early Mission (2021–2022)

Anthropic’s roots trace back to growing discussions among AI researchers who worried about the rapid pace of AI development without commensurate safety and alignment research. Dario Amodei had served as Vice President of Research at OpenAI, where he led teams on large language models and technical research into robustness and interpretability. Dissatisfied with the industry’s focus on raw capability growth over safety considerations, several researchers—including Dario, Daniela, Jared Kaplan, Jack Clark, Chris Olah, Ben Mann, Sam McCandlish, and Tom Brown – decided to form a new organization.

Anthropic was established as a public benefit corporation (PBC) – a legal structure that commits the company to broader societal goals and governance priorities beyond shareholder profit. This structure was designed to embed ethical commitments into the organization’s DNA, reinforcing its dedication to developing safe, controllable, and interpretable AI systems.

In May 2021, Anthropic raised its first major financing: a $124 million Series A funding round, enabling the company to begin building out infrastructure and research teams dedicated to foundational AI safety work.

In April 2022, a Series B round secured $580 million, led by early-stage investors including FTX founder Sam Bankman‑Fried and others. This capital injection allowed Anthropic to expand both its research capacity and engineering teams, with the goal of creating AI models that were steerable, robust, and reliable rather than merely powerful.

Building Claude: A New Kind of AI

A key differentiator in Anthropic’s history was its technical approach to model development. Rather than simply racing to create the largest possible language model, Anthropic invested heavily in Constitutional AI—a research framework intended to encode guiding principles into models so they could better self‑regulate undesirable behaviors without excessive human oversight. This approach aimed to balance utility with safety, especially in high‑stakes applications such as business automation or information management.

The first version of the company’s flagship AI, named Claude, was completed in the summer of 2022. Anthropic chose not to immediately release it publicly, emphasizing that internal safety testing was essential before widespread deployment. This cautious rollout contrasted sharply with other industry practices and underscored the company’s foundational commitment to responsible AI.

Rapid Growth, Strategic Partnerships, and Funding Surges (2023–2024)

As Claude matured, Anthropic’s reputation as a serious competitor in the AI landscape began to grow. Strategic partnerships and investments accelerated this trajectory:

In 2023, Amazon Web Services (AWS) became an early major investor, committing up to $4 billion across multiple stages and designating AWS as Anthropic’s primary cloud provider. Google also invested in the company, pledging hundreds of millions in support and AI infrastructure collaboration.
By early 2024, Anthropic had expanded its team significantly, recruiting notable AI researchers such as Jan Leike, John Schulman, and Durk Kingma from OpenAI and other leading labs.
Additional commercial momentum came from enterprise integrations—such as Claude’s integration with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform—laying the foundation for future business use cases.

Throughout 2023–2024, Anthropic also continued to refine Claude’s capabilities, evolving it from a textbook research project into a commercially viable product that could support coding tasks, automate workflows, and assist with complex business functions.

Breaking Records in 2025: Scaling and Valuation

By 2025, Anthropic’s strategy of blending ethical AI commitments with enterprise usability began yielding dramatic results.

In March 2025, Anthropic closed a Series E funding round of $3.5 billion, achieving a post‑money valuation of about $61.5 billion. Major venture capital firms, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from global institutional investors, underscored confidence in the company’s trajectory.

The company used this capital to expand product offerings, including Claude 4, which introduced the Opus and Sonnet variants with stronger coding and reasoning capabilities, and allowed developers greater flexibility via API enhancements such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector. Anthropic also hosted its first developer conference, signaling its commitment to building a developer ecosystem around Claude.

Revenue figures began climbing rapidly. By August 2025, the company’s annual revenue run rate had reportedly grown from roughly $1 billion earlier in the year to over $5 billion, fueled by enterprise subscriptions and API usage. Its customer base expanded to include hundreds of thousands of business accounts, many paying significant fees for enterprise‑grade capabilities.

In September 2025, Anthropic closed an even larger Series F funding round—$13 billion at a $183 billion valuation—making it one of the best‑funded private AI startups in history. Sovereign wealth funds and major institutional investors participated actively, reflecting global appetite for AI infrastructure growth.

That same month, the company also announced a policy restricting the sale of its products to entities majority‑owned by governments of China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea on national security grounds—a notable step in aligning commercial strategy with geopolitical considerations.

Strategic Technology Partnerships and Compute Scale

Financing and product milestones were matched by large strategic technology deals:

In October 2025, Anthropic forged a high‑profile partnership with Google to access up to one million of Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—specialized accelerators designed for large‑scale AI training and inference. This secured over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity, a scale critical to keeping Claude competitive with rivals such as OpenAI and Google’s own Gemini models.
In November 2025, a multibillion‑dollar collaboration with NVIDIA and Microsoft was finalized. NVIDIA and Microsoft were expected to invest up to ~$15 billion combined, and Anthropic committed to purchasing about $30 billion in cloud computing capacity running on Microsoft Azure’s infrastructure powered by NVIDIA hardware.

These partnerships ensured that Anthropic did not lag in one of the most capital‑intensive parts of AI innovation—compute scale. Access to diverse, powerful hardware enabled competitive model performance while lowering bottlenecks for enterprise clients.

Preparing for Public Markets and Secondary Liquidity

By late 2025 and early 2026, Anthropic’s leadership was openly preparing for what could become one of the largest technology IPOs in history. Reports indicated that the company had begun groundwork with major law firms and investment banks to pursue a public listing in 2026, potentially before competitors like OpenAI.

In early 2026, Anthropic also offered secondary share sales totaling roughly $5 to 6 billion to employees and early contributors, reflecting the massive increase in valuation since the company’s earlier fundraising rounds and providing liquidity while its IPO plans matured.

Leadership, Governance, and Company Culture

Anthropic’s governance structure differs from typical Silicon Valley startups. Its Long‑Term Benefit Trust holds special voting shares designed to ensure that safety and benefit‑focused principles remain central over time. Members of the trust, selected for expertise in ethics, policy, and national interest, could influence board elections and strategic direction.

The founders fostered a culture that balanced ambitious technical growth with a unique emphasis on internal debate about alignment, ethics, and social impact. This was reflected not only in research direction but in public company commitments such as safety frameworks and operational policies.

Evolving Safety Posture and Controversies in 2026

Despite its reputation for prioritizing ethical development, Anthropic’s safety posture evolved in response to industry dynamics. In early 2026, the company publicly updated its Responsible Scaling Policy, removing some aspects of its earlier pledge that had barred training new models without guaranteed safety measures. Reasons cited by Anthropic leadership included the need to remain competitive and adapt to rapidly shifting technological and geopolitical pressures.

This shift reignited debate about whether commercial imperatives were beginning to outweigh foundational safety commitments. Critics warned that incremental erosion of safety constraints could increase long‑term systemic risk, even if the company framed the change as a pragmatic pivot toward transparency and adaptable risk management.

Tensions with the U.S. Government

One of the most consequential developments in early 2026 involved a standoff with the U.S. federal government. The Trump administration, citing national security concerns, designated Anthropic a threat and effectively barred all federal agencies from using its AI technology—including Claude and related systems. This unprecedented move, followed by the Department of Defense formally labeling Anthropic a “supply‑chain risk,” was rooted in clashes over how the company’s models could be used in military contexts, particularly for autonomous weapons systems and mass surveillance.

Anthropic’s leadership publicly refused to relax ethical oversight on how its models are used, arguing that unrestricted military deployment would undermine democratic values and create unacceptable risk. In doing so, the company faced potentially significant commercial and reputational challenges, as government contracts represent major revenue streams for advanced technology providers. Anthropic vowed to legally challenge the government designation, framing it as unprecedented and unjust.

This dispute highlighted deeper tensions about the role of private AI companies in national defense, civil liberties, and the ethics of emerging technologies. It also underscored how Anthropic’s philosophical commitments – once seen as purely academic – could have real geopolitical consequences.

Enterprise Products, Developer Tools, and Market Impact

Through 2025–2026, Anthropic diversified its AI portfolio considerably:

Claude Code became a popular developer tool with integrations into IDEs and support for automated engineering workflows, contributing significant revenue and adoption among professional developers.
Claude Cowork and industry‑specific plug‑ins further expanded the utility of Claude into business workflows, assisting with HR, research, and administrative tasks.
Other specialized offerings targeted sectors such as healthcare and finance, enabling Claude to assist with compliance tasks, risk analysis, and domain‑specific knowledge work.

This suite of differentiated products helped Anthropic penetrate the enterprise market, drawing revenue from subscription services and API access, and contributing to projections of continued rapid growth well beyond the mid‑2020s.

Conclusion: Anthropic’s Place in the AI Era

From its founding in 2021 as a principled alternative in a competitive AI landscape to its position in 2026 as one of the most valuable and influential AI companies globally, Anthropic’s journey reflects broader tensions and opportunities in the AI revolution:

It demonstrated how ethical and safety considerations could be embedded into a commercial enterprise without halting growth.
It proved that significant capital and strategic partnerships – ranging from AWS to Google, Microsoft, and sovereign investors – can be marshaled behind safety‑oriented technology.
And it revealed that philosophical commitments to AI governance can collide with geopolitical and military imperatives, producing friction at the highest levels of national policy.

As Anthropic reportedly approaches a potential IPO and continues to expand its technological footprint, its history to date illustrates the complex interplay between innovation, responsibility, and global power dynamics that define the modern AI industry.