Anthropic

Anthropic, PBC is an American artificial intelligence (AI) safety and research company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2021 by a group of former senior members from OpenAI, including siblings Dario Amodei (CEO) and Daniela Amodei (President), the company was established with a primary focus on the responsible development of AI. The founders departed from OpenAI due to differing views on the company's direction, particularly concerning safety and commercialization. Anthropic is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), a legal framework that obligates the company to balance the financial interests of its stockholders with its stated public benefit: 'the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.' This commitment is further solidified by a unique governance structure involving a 'Long-Term Benefit Trust,' designed to ensure the company's mission remains aligned with public interest as AI technology advances.

The core of Anthropic's work revolves around building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The company's flagship product is a family of large language models (LLMs) named Claude, which are direct competitors to systems like OpenAI's GPT series and Google's Gemini. Anthropic has pioneered a technique known as 'Constitutional AI' to train its models. This approach involves providing the AI with a set of principles or a 'constitution' to guide its responses, aiming to make the models helpful, harmless, and honest without relying on extensive human feedback for every undesirable output. The company conducts and publishes extensive research on AI safety, interpretability, and societal impacts, aiming to treat safety as a systematic science. Through its products and research, Anthropic seeks to lead a 'race to the top on safety' within the AI industry, demonstrating that prioritizing ethical considerations and responsible development can be a viable and successful business model in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence.