Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers, led by siblings Dario Amodei (CEO) and Daniela Amodei (President). The company surfaced publicly on May 28, 2021, when it announced that it had “raised $124 million in a Series A.” That announcement describes the organization as “an AI safety and research company” focused on making “the fundamental research advances that will let us build more capable, general, and reliable AI systems.”
Anthropic’s own company page states its mission plainly: “Anthropic is an AI safety and research company. We build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.” Its stated purpose is the “responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.” The early Series A was led by Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, with the company’s stated focus on “increasing the reliability of large-scale AI models.”
Anthropic mattered as the emergence of a serious, safety-first counterweight in frontier AI. The lab went on to release the Claude family of assistants beginning in 2023, develop the Constitutional AI training method, and become one of a small number of labs operating at the frontier of model capability.