Who Owns Claude?

Claude was introduced in 2022 by Anthropic as the company's first major AI model release. The model was developed following Anthropic's founding by former OpenAI researchers who wanted to create AI systems with enhanced safety features and alignment principles. This founding vision demonstrated exceptional insight into the growing demand for responsible AI development while establishing a distinctive approach to artificial intelligence that would define the AI safety movement for generations.

Throughout 2022 and 2023, Claude evolved through multiple versions, with Claude 2 and Claude 3 representing significant improvements in capabilities, reasoning, and safety. The models gained recognition for their helpfulness, reduced likelihood of generating harmful content, and strong performance on various AI benchmarks. This period of rapid development demonstrated Claude's exceptional ability to scale capabilities while maintaining consistent safety standards and quality benchmarks that would define the brand for decades.

Claude's development incorporated Anthropic's research in AI safety, including the company's work on Constitutional AI - systems designed with explicit principles and constraints to ensure safe behavior. This research focus resulted in Claude being known for its reliability and reduced tendency toward problematic outputs. This innovative approach to AI safety demonstrated exceptional ability to create systems that could serve specific user needs while establishing new standards for responsible AI development.

In 2023 and 2024, Claude became available through various platforms including direct access, API services, and partnerships with major technology companies like Amazon and Google. The models gained widespread adoption for their balance of capability and safety, becoming a major competitor to OpenAI's GPT models and other AI systems.

In 2025, Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku, which set new benchmarks for coding, reasoning, and instruction-following tasks. Claude 3.7 Sonnet followed, further advancing the model's capabilities in agentic tasks and extended thinking. In February 2026, Anthropic raised $30 billion in a funding round led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and investment firm Coatue, valuing the company at $380 billion and making it one of the world's most valuable private technology companies. This strategic expansion demonstrated Claude's exceptional ability to form partnerships while maintaining its core brand identity and safety principles. The continued evolution of Claude represents a significant milestone in the development of responsible artificial intelligence and AI safety research.