Dario Amodei

Anthropic was founded on January 26, 2021 by seven or eight former OpenAI employees, most prominently siblings Dario Amodei (former OpenAI VP of Research) and Daniela Amodei, along with Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Chris Olah, Ben Mann, Sam McCandlish, and Jared Kaplan. The founders left OpenAI over directional disagreements about how aggressively to commercialize increasingly powerful AI systems, and structured Anthropic from the outset as a Delaware public benefit corporation (PBC) with a mission of ensuring 'the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI.' The company raised roughly $124 million in a seed round in May 2021, then $580 million in April 2022 (including a controversial $500 million investment from FTX under Sam Bankman-Fried, whose stake was later sold by the FTX bankruptcy estate).

Anthropic's flagship product is Claude, a family of large language models. The first Claude and Claude Instant models were released in March 2023, followed by the more capable Claude 2 in July 2023. Anthropic then shipped Claude 3 (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku) in March 2024, Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024, and Claude 4 (Opus and Sonnet) in May 2025, alongside the introduction of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Claude Code, its agentic command-line coding tool, which became a major growth driver and popularized 'vibe coding.' Product expansion continued into 2026 with Claude Cowork (a GUI agent for non-technical users), Claude Design, Claude Science, Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, and ultimately Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus 5 by mid-2026. In April 2026 Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos, its most advanced (and most tightly restricted) model, built with heightened cybersecurity and biosecurity safeguards and initially limited to vetted U.S. organizations.

Anthropic's funding trajectory has been defined by two parallel tracks: traditional venture/growth rounds and large strategic cloud-infrastructure investments from Amazon and Google. Amazon first invested in September 2023 ($1.25B of a planned $4B), completed that commitment in March 2024 ($2.75B more), and then doubled its total stake with an additional $4B in November 2024 — bringing Amazon's cumulative investment to roughly $8 billion and cementing AWS as Anthropic's primary cloud and training-compute partner (with Claude also distributed via Amazon Bedrock). Google invested $500 million in October 2023 with a commitment of up to $2 billion more over time, then added another $1 billion in early 2025; in October 2025 the companies struck a major cloud-compute deal giving Anthropic access to up to one million Google TPUs, potentially adding over one gigawatt of capacity by 2026. On the pure equity side, Anthropic raised a $3.5B Series E in March 2025 at a $61.5B post-money valuation (led by Lightspeed Venture Partners), then a $13B Series F in September 2025 at a $183B valuation (co-led by ICONIQ Capital, Fidelity Management & Research, and Lightspeed, with Qatar Investment Authority participating) — this is the round at which Greylock Partners became an investor. A term sheet for a further $10B at a $350B valuation (led by Coatue and GIC) was signed at the end of December 2025, and in February 2026 Anthropic closed a $30B Series G at a $380B post-money valuation. In November 2025, Nvidia and Microsoft agreed to invest up to a combined $15B in Anthropic as part of a new compute alliance, under which Anthropic committed to purchase $30B of Azure compute running on Nvidia systems. By May 2026, Anthropic had raised a further ~$65B from investors including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Sequoia Capital, pushing its valuation to $965 billion and making it, by some measures, more valuable than OpenAI. Reporting in August 2026 indicated Anthropic was pursuing an October 2026 IPO with speculated valuations as high as $2 trillion, alongside disclosed internal projections of roughly $190–200 billion in 2028 revenue and an annualized revenue run rate said to have topped $65 billion by late July 2026 — figures that should be treated as fast-moving and not yet fully independently verified.

Business model

B2B and B2C SaaS/API: sells access to Claude models via a consumer subscription chatbot, a usage-based developer API, enterprise agreements, and distribution through cloud marketplaces (AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, Microsoft Foundry), plus agentic coding/productivity products (Claude Code, Claude Cowork) and government-specific offerings (Claude Gov).

Usage-based API/token pricing, tiered consumer subscriptions (Claude Pro/Max-style plans), enterprise licensing/contracts, and government contracts (e.g., DoD).