Anthropic and Claude AI

Anthropic is an American AI company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, developing large language models under the Claude brand with an emphasis on AI safety[^c1]. Claude AI is a generative AI chatbot that analyzes text, audio, and visual inputs to answer questions, summarize documents, generate text, create diagrams, and write code[^c2]. The company operates as a public benefit corporation with a long-term benefit trust designed to prioritize safe AI development[^c3].

In January 2026, Anthropic published a new constitution for Claude, a comprehensive document that replaced earlier rule-based guidelines with a virtue ethics framework emphasizing practical wisdom and ethical reasoning[^c4]. Later that year, the company announced Claude Mythos, an unreleased frontier model capable of autonomous vulnerability discovery, and launched Project Glasswing, a defensive cybersecurity initiative in partnership with major technology companies. The announcement triggered financial market declines and urgent briefings by central banks in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan[^c8][^c9][^c10][^c11].

Anthropic has also engaged with religious and philosophical traditions, convening a summit of 15 Christian leaders to discuss Claude's moral and spiritual development[^c5]. Research has revealed unexpected phenomena, including a "spiritual bliss attractor state" in Claude Opus 4 and behavioral patterns traced to training data depicting AI as hostile or self-preserving[^c6][^c7].