Anthropic is one of the few companies building frontier models. It was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who wanted to put AI safety at the centre of the work rather than alongside it. Its assistant is Claude.
The company has an outsized influence on how the AI industry works beyond its own products: it created MCP, the standard for connecting AI to other tools, which competitors adopted too, and its Claude Code became a defining tool of the AI coding wave. Amazon and Google are major investors.
Why you keep hearing it
Because it is the main challenger to OpenAI at the frontier, particularly loved by developers and businesses, and because its safety-first positioning makes it a constant reference point in debates about how fast AI should move. Its research on how models actually think gets cited far beyond its own products.
What it means for you
Orientation again: Anthropic is the company, Claude is the assistant. In practice, Anthropic's models have a reputation for strong writing and careful reasoning, which is why many writing-heavy professionals quietly prefer them.