Who owns Anthropic – the company behind Claude AI?
Reviewed By: Kevin Pocock
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As one of the leading rivals to ChatGPT, the Claude chatbot has led many eyes to look to Anthropic AI. As the company behind the large language model Claude, Anthropic is focused on building AI systems that people can rely on amongst the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence. However, who actually owns this AI startup, and are major tech industry players getting involved? This article will dig into who owns Anthropic, as well as explore who some of its high-profile investors are.
Who owns Anthropic?
Founded in 2021, Anthropic is an AI startup and public benefit corporation created by two former members of the senior team at OpenAI. The main founders are the siblings, Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, with the latter Dario taking the role of the company’s CEO. There are a number of other co-founders, including Jack Clark, Tom Brown (lead engineer for GPT-3), and Sam McCandlish according to Crunchbase.
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In terms of board members, the number remains on the smaller side at just four members, with two of those being the Amodei siblings. There is also Luke Muehlhauser, the lead grantmaker on AI governance at the charitable group Open Philanthropy, who represents the earlier company shareholders, and Yasmin Razavi, a venture capitalist who led Anthropic's latest round of funding.
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Is Anthropic owned by Google? Anthropic funding explained
No, Anthropic is not owned by Google, but they do have a 10% stake in the company and are one of its key investors, having put over $300 million dollars into Anthropic’s funding and research. The move almost mirrors Microsoft’s huge investment into the AI company OpenAI that eventually led to the sensational chatbot ChatGPT. However, it seems that Google won’t have an active role in incorporating Anthropic’s technology into its systems as Microsoft has had with OpenAI and ChatGPT, but it has put a significant amount of money into the company.
Essentially, Anthropic has an ethos of AI safety and the responsible creation and usage of artificial intelligence and is looking to make fundamental research advances in the field. However, it seems the company’s own future remains secure, as the OpenAI rival has now successfully navigated three series of funding, bringing its funding valuation to a total of over $4.1 billion.
There have been three major rounds of funding so far. The first, Series A, took place back in 2021, and was led by Jaan Tallinn, technology investor and co-founder of Skype. The round also included participation from Eric Schmidt, James McClave, Asana cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research among other companies. Led by Spark Capital, the Series C funding ended back in May, with participation from big industry players including Google, Zoom Ventures, and Sound Ventures that contributed to the development of Claude and Claude 2.
Anthropic Amazon investment
Amazon has started making moves to become a significant force in the realm of AI, and will now be taking a minority ownership position in Anthropic. This is alongside a huge input of up to $4 billion dollars of funding.
The two companies have announced that they are forming a strategic collaboration to advance generative AI models, with the startup selecting Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider. It’s Anthropic’s second investment from a big tech company, following its previous investment from Google.
Is Anthropic a private company? In short, yes.
Despite its status as a public benefit corporation, Anthropic is still a privately held for-profit company. Collectively, the company is owned by employees, wealthy individuals, corporations, venture capital firms, and co-founders.
Is Anthropic a real company? Of course!
Yes, Anthropic is a real startup company based in San Francisco, aiming towards building reliable AI systems to future-proof artificial intelligence. You can read more about Anthropic’s goals, and try out using their flagship product Claude through the company website.
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