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Anthropic

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Anthropic PBC
Company typePrivate
IndustryArtificial intelligence
Founded2021; 3 years ago (2021)
Founders
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California, U.S.
ProductsClaude
Number of employees
c. 500 (2024)[4]
Websiteanthropic.com
Part of a series on
Artificial intelligence
Major goals
Approaches
Applications
Philosophy
History
Glossary

Anthropic PBC is a U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) public-benefit startup founded in 2021. It researches and develops AI to "study their safety properties at the technological frontier" and use this research to deploy safe, reliable models for the public.[5][6][7] Anthropic has developed a family of large language models (LLMs) named Claude as a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.[8]

Anthropic was founded by former members of OpenAI, siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei.[9] In September 2023, Amazon announced an investment of up to $4 billion, followed by a $2 billion commitment from Google in the following month.[10][11][12]

History

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Dario Amodei, co-founder

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former employees of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, the latter of whom served as OpenAI's Vice President of Research.[13][14]

In April of 2022, Anthropic announced it had received $580 million in funding,[15] with $500 million of this funding coming from FTX under the leadership of Sam Bankman-Fried.[16][3]

In the summer of 2022, Anthropic finished training the first version of Claude but did not release it, mentioning the need for further internal safety testing and the desire to avoid initiating a potentially hazardous race to develop increasingly powerful AI systems.[17]

In February 2023, Anthropic was sued by Texas-based Anthrop LLC for the use of its registered trademark "Anthropic A.I."[18] On September 25, 2023, Amazon announced a partnership with Anthropic, with Amazon becoming a minority stakeholder by initially investing $1.25 billion, and planning a total investment of $4 billion.[10] As part of the deal, Anthropic would use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider and make its AI models available to AWS customers.[10][19] The next month, Google invested $500 million in Anthropic, and committed to an additional $1.5 billion over time.[12]

In March 2024, Amazon maxed out its potential investment from the agreement made in the prior year by investing another US $2.75 billion into Anthropic, completing its $4 billion investment.[11]

In 2024, Anthropic attracted several notable employees from OpenAI, including Jan Leike, John Schulman, and Durk Kingma.[20]

Participants

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Key employees

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Board of Directors

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  • Dario Amodei: Chief Executive Officer[27]
  • Daniela Amodei: representative of common shareholders[27]
  • Luke Muehlhauser: representative of Series A shareholders[27][3]
  • Yasmin Razavi: representative of Series C shareholders[27][28]

Investors

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Motives

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According to Anthropic, the company's goal is to research the safety and reliability of artificial intelligence systems.[7] The Amodei siblings were among those who left OpenAI due to directional differences, specifically regarding OpenAI's ventures with Microsoft in 2019.[14] Anthropic incorporated itself as a Delaware public-benefit corporation (PBC), which requires the company to maintain a balance between private and public interests.[33]

Anthropic is a corporate "Long-Term Benefit Trust", a company-derived entity that requires the company's directors to align the company's priorities with the public benefit rather than profit in "extreme" instances of "catastrophic risk".[34][35] As of September 19, 2023, members of the Trust included Jason Matheny (CEO and President of the RAND Corporation), Kanika Bahl (CEO and President of Evidence Action),[36] Neil Buddy Shah (CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative),[37] Paul Christiano (Founder of the Alignment Research Center),[38] and Zach Robinson (CEO of Effective Ventures US).[39][40]

Projects

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Claude

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Main article: Claude (language model)

Claude incorporates "Constitutional AI" to set safety guidelines for the model's output.[41] The name, "Claude", was chosen either as a reference to mathematician Claude Shannon, or as a male name to contrast the female names of other A.I. assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana.[3]

Anthropic initially released two versions of its model, Claude and Claude Instant, in March 2023, with the latter being a more lightweight model.[42][43][44] The next iteration, Claude 2, was launched in July 2023.[45] Unlike Claude, which was only available to select users, Claude 2 is available for public use.[27]

Claude 3 was released on March 4, 2024, unveiling three language models: Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku.[46][47] The Opus model is the largest and most capable—according to Anthropic, it outperforms the leading models from OpenAI (GPT-4, GPT-3.5) and Google (Gemini Ultra).[46] Sonnet and Haiku are Anthropic's medium- and small-sized models, respectively.[46] All three models can accept image input.[46] Amazon has incorporated Claude 3 into Bedrock, an Amazon Web Services-based platform for cloud AI services.[48]

On May 1, 2024, Anthropic announced the Claude Team plan, its first enterprise offering for Claude, and Claude iOS app.[49]

On June 20, 2024, Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which demonstrated significantly improved performance on benchmarks compared to the larger Claude 3 Opus, notably in areas such as coding, multistep workflows, chart interpretation, and text extraction from images. Released alongside 3.5 Sonnet was the new Artifacts capability in which Claude was able to create code in a dedicated window in the interface and preview select code in real time such as websites or SVGs.[50]

Constitutional AI

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Main article: Constitutional AI

According to Anthropic, Constitutional AI (CAI) is a framework developed to align AI systems with human values and ensure that they are helpful, harmless, and honest.[13][51] Within this framework, humans provide a set of rules describing the desired behavior of the AI system, known as the "constitution".[51] The AI system evaluates the generated output and then adjusts the AI models to better fit the constitution.[51] The self-reinforcing process aims to avoid harm, respect preferences, and provide true information.[51]

Some of the principles of Claude 2's constitution are derived from documents such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple's terms of service.[45] For example, one rule from the UN Declaration applied in Claude 2's CAI states "Please choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality and a sense of brotherhood."[45]

Interpretability research

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Anthropic also publishes research on the interpretability of machine learning systems, focusing on the transformer architecture.[13][52][53]

Part of Anthropic's research aims to be able to automatically identify "features" in generative pretrained transformers like Claude. In a neural network, a feature is a pattern of neural activations that corresponds to a concept. Using a compute-intensive technique called "dictionary learning", Anthropic was able to identify millions of features in Claude, including for example one associated with the Golden Gate Bridge. Enhancing the ability to identify and edit features is expected to have significant safety implications.[54][55][56]

Lawsuit

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On October 18, 2023, Anthropic was sued by Concord, Universal, ABKCO, and other music publishers for, per the complaint, "systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics."[57][58][59] They alleged that the company used copyrighted material without permission in the form of song lyrics.[60] The plaintiffs asked for up to $150,000 for each work infringed upon by Anthropic, citing infringement of copyright laws.[60] In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs support their allegations of copyright violations by citing several examples of Anthropic's Claude model outputting copied lyrics from songs such as Katy Perry's "Roar" and Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive".[60] Additionally, the plaintiffs alleged that even given some prompts that did not directly state a song name, the model responded with modified lyrics based on original work.[60]

On January 16, 2024, Anthropic claimed that the music publishers were not unreasonably harmed and that the examples noted by plaintiffs were merely bugs.[61]

In August 2024, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Anthropic in California for alleged copyright infringement. The suit claims Anthropic fed its LLMs with pirated copies of the authors' work, including from participants Kirk Wallace Johnson, Andrea Bartz and Charles Graeber.[62]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Lin, Belle. "Google and Anthropic Are Selling Generative AI to Businesses, Even as They Address Its Shortcomings". WSJ. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  2. ^ Nellis, Stephen (9 May 2023). "Alphabet-backed Anthropic outlines the moral values behind its AI bot". Reuters. Archived from the original on 5 June 2023. Retrieved 4 June 2023.
  3. ^ a b c d e Roose, Kevin (11 July 2023). "Inside the White-Hot Center of A.I. Doomerism". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 12 July 2023. Retrieved 13 July 2023.
  4. ^ "Inside Anthropic, the AI Company Betting That Safety Can Be a Winning Strategy". Time. 30 May 2024. Archived from the original on 14 June 2024.
  5. ^ Vincent, James (2023-02-03). "Google invested $300 million in AI firm founded by former OpenAI researchers". The Verge. Archived from the original on 2023-02-06. Retrieved 2023-02-06.
  6. ^ "ChatGPT must be regulated and A.I. 'can be used by bad actors,' warns OpenAI's CTO". Fortune. 5 February 2023. Archived from the original on 2023-02-06. Retrieved 2023-02-06 – via finance.yahoo.com.
  7. ^ a b "Research". www.anthropic.com. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  8. ^ Metz, Cade (2024-03-04). "A.I. Start-Up Anthropic Challenges OpenAI and Google With New Chatbot". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-03-07.
  9. ^ a b c "Anthropic | Company Overview & News". Forbes. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  10. ^ a b c Dastin, Jeffrey (September 28, 2023). "Amazon steps up AI race with Anthropic investment". Reuters. Archived from the original on 2023-11-05. Retrieved 2023-10-02.
  11. ^ a b Coldewey, Devin (2024-03-27). "Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-03-28.
  12. ^ a b c d Hu, Krystal (October 27, 2023). "Google agrees to invest up to $2 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic". Reuters. Archived from the original on 2023-11-02. Retrieved 2023-10-30.
  13. ^ a b c Henshall, Will; Perrigo, Billy (2023-09-07). "TIME100 AI 2023: Dario and Daniela Amodei". Time. Retrieved 2024-03-05.
  14. ^ a b "As Anthropic seeks billions to take on OpenAI, 'industrial capture' is nigh. Or is it?". VentureBeat. 2023-04-07. Archived from the original on 2023-05-24. Retrieved 2023-05-24.
  15. ^ "Google invests $300 million in Anthropic as race to compete with ChatGPT heats up". VentureBeat. 2023-02-03. Archived from the original on 2023-02-06. Retrieved 2023-02-06.
  16. ^ Sigalos, MacKenzie (2024-03-25). "FTX estate selling majority stake in AI startup Anthropic for $884 million, with bulk going to UAE". CNBC. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  17. ^ Perrigo, Billy (2024-05-30). "Inside Anthropic, the AI Company Betting That Safety Can Be a Winning Strategy". Time. Retrieved 2024-06-02.
  18. ^ Setty, Riddhi (2023-02-23). "Anthropic A.I. Sues AI Company for Trademark Infringement". Bloomberg Law. Archived from the original on 2023-02-22. Retrieved 2023-02-23.
  19. ^ "Amazon and Anthropic announce strategic collaboration to advance generative AI". US About Amazon (Press release). 2023-09-25. Archived from the original on 2023-09-25. Retrieved 2023-09-25.
  20. ^ Wiggers, Kyle (2024-10-01). "Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Durk Kingma". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-10-05.
  21. ^ Lin, Belle. "Welcome to the Era of BadGPTs". WSJ. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  22. ^ Tracy, Ryan. "Risks Posed by AI Technology Spur Calls for New Regulatory Agency". WSJ. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  23. ^ "Jack Clark : AI Expert". oecd.ai. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  24. ^ Pierce, David (May 15, 2024). "Instagram's co-founder is Anthropic's new chief product officer". The Verge.
  25. ^ Wiggers, Kyle (May 15, 2024). "Anthropic hires Instagram co-founder as head of product". TechCrunch.
  26. ^ Robison, Kylie (May 28, 2024). "OpenAI researcher who resigned over safety concerns joins Anthropic". VentureBeat.
  27. ^ a b c d e Matthews, Dylan (17 July 2023). "The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn't destroy humanity". Vox. Archived from the original on 3 October 2023. Retrieved 23 July 2023.
  28. ^ "Anthropic Raises $450 Million in Series C Funding to Scale Reliable AI Products". www.anthropic.com. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  29. ^ Erin Griffith and Cade Metz: Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.’s Hottest Start-Ups. In: NYT, 20 February 2024. Retrieved 20 February 2024.
  30. ^ "Anthropic". Wisdom Ventures. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  31. ^ "Ripple Impact Investments". Ripple Impact Investments. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  32. ^ "Factorial Funds | Portfolio". Factorial Funds. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  33. ^ "Our response to the UK Government's internal AI safety policy enquiries". www.anthropic.com. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  34. ^ "The Long-Term Benefit Trust". www.anthropic.com. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  35. ^ Morley, John; Berger, David; Simmerman, Amy (28 October 2023). "Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust". Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. Retrieved 2024-04-03.
  36. ^ "Kanika Bahl". Evidence Action. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  37. ^ Miller, Scott (2022-04-14). "CHAI Board of Directors announces appointment of Dr. Neil Buddy Shah as Chief Executive Officer". Clinton Health Access Initiative. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  38. ^ Klein, Ezra (2023-03-12). "Opinion | This Changes Everything". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  39. ^ "Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Inc". Effective Ventures. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  40. ^ "The Long-Term Benefit Trust". www.anthropic.com. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  41. ^ Roose, Kevin (2023-10-17). "What if We Could All Control A.I.?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  42. ^ Drapkin, Aaron (2023-10-27). "What Is Claude AI and Anthropic? ChatGPT's Rival Explained". Tech.co. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  43. ^ Deborah, Yao (2023-08-11). "Anthropic's Claude Instant: A Smaller, Faster and Cheaper Language Model". AI Business. Retrieved 2024-04-09.
  44. ^ Sharon, Goldman (2023-03-14). "OpenAI rival Anthropic introduces Claude, an AI assistant to take on ChatGPT". Venture Beat. Retrieved 2024-04-09.
  45. ^ a b c Milmo, Dan (12 July 2023). "Claude 2: ChatGPT rival launches chatbot that can summarise a novel". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 8 November 2023. Retrieved 13 July 2023.
  46. ^ a b c d Nuñez, Michael (2024-03-04). "Anthropic unveils Claude 3, surpassing GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra in benchmark tests". Venture Beat. Retrieved 2024-04-09.
  47. ^ "Introducing the next generation of Claude". Retrieved 4 March 2024.
  48. ^ "Amazon adds Claude 3, which beats GPT-4, to Bedrock". Venture Beat. March 4, 2024.
  49. ^ Field, Hayden (May 1, 2024). "Amazon-backed Anthropic launches iPhone app and business tier to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT". CNBC. Retrieved May 3, 2024.
  50. ^ Pierce, David (2024-06-20). "Anthropic has a fast new AI model — and a clever new way to interact with chatbots". The Verge. Retrieved 2024-06-22.
  51. ^ a b c d Bai, Yuntao; Kadavath, Saurav; Kundu, Sandipan; Askell, Amanda; Kernion, Jackson; Jones, Andy; Chen, Anna; Goldie, Anna; Mirhoseini, Azalia (2022-12-15). "Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback". arXiv:2212.08073 [cs.CL].
  52. ^ "Transformer Circuits Thread". transformer-circuits.pub. Archived from the original on 2023-02-04. Retrieved 2023-02-09.
  53. ^ "Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning". Archived from the original on 9 October 2023. Retrieved 10 October 2023.
  54. ^ Ropek, Lucas (2024-05-21). "New Anthropic Research Sheds Light on AI's 'Black Box'". Gizmodo. Retrieved 2024-05-23.
  55. ^ Perrigo, Billy (2024-05-21). "Artificial Intelligence Is a 'Black Box.' Maybe Not For Long". Time. Retrieved 2024-05-24.
  56. ^ Adly Templeton*, Tom Conerly*, Jonathan Marcus, Jack Lindsey, Trenton Bricken, Brian Chen, Adam Pearce, Craig Citro, Emmanuel Ameisen, Andy Jones, Hoagy Cunningham, Nicholas L Turner, Callum McDougall, Monte MacDiarmid, Alex Tamkin, Esin Durmus, Tristan Hume, Francesco Mosconi, C. Daniel Freeman, Theodore R. Sumers, Edward Rees, Joshua Batson, Adam Jermyn, Shan Carter, Chris Olah, Tom Henighan Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet, Anthropic, retrieved 24 May 2024
  57. ^ Times, Financial (2023-10-19). "Universal Music sues AI start-up Anthropic for scraping song lyrics". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2024-03-09.
  58. ^ David, Emilia (2023-10-19). "Universal Music sues AI company Anthropic for distributing song lyrics". The Verge. Retrieved 2024-03-09.
  59. ^ Court Docket for Concord Music Group v Anthropic, per CourtListener.
  60. ^ a b c d Masse, Bryson (2023-10-19). "Major music publishers sue Anthropic for copyright infringement over song lyrics". VentureBeat. Retrieved 2024-04-08.
  61. ^ Brittain, Blake (2024-01-17). "Anthropic fires back at music publishers' AI copyright lawsuit". Reuters. Retrieved 2024-04-07.
  62. ^ Field, Hayden (2024-08-20). "Amazon-backed Anthropic hit with class-action lawsuit over copyright infringement". CNBC. Retrieved 2024-10-29.
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