What is Anthropic and why did they build Claude instead of improving existing AI?

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and several colleagues who previously worked at OpenAI. They left because of disagreements about the pace of AI deployment and the prioritization of safety research. Anthropic's core mission is the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity, with safety as a first-class concern rather than an afterthought.

Anthropic developed a safety approach called Constitutional AI, which is one of the techniques used to train Claude. Instead of relying purely on human feedback to shape the model's behavior, Constitutional AI gives the model a set of principles and has it evaluate and revise its own responses against those principles. This aims to make the model more consistently honest and less harmful in a scalable way.

The name Claude is widely believed to be a reference to Claude Shannon, the mathematician who founded information theory in the 1940s. Shannon's work on how information can be quantified, stored, and transmitted is foundational to all of modern computing and, by extension, to AI and machine learning.

Anthropic has raised billions in investment from companies including Google and Amazon, and Amazon has integrated Claude into its AWS Bedrock platform, making Claude available as a managed API service for enterprise customers. This means you can run Claude through AWS infrastructure with enterprise-grade security and compliance guarantees.

What sets Anthropic apart philosophically is that they publish safety research openly even when it highlights risks with their own models. They also maintain an Acceptable Use Policy that is more restrictive than some competitors. Whether you see this as responsible or overly cautious, it reflects a genuine organizational commitment to thinking carefully about AI risks rather than just racing to ship capabilities.