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]. As of May 2026, Anthropic was valued at $965 billion after a $65 billion Series H funding round that surpassed OpenAI's valuation, employed approximately 5,000 people, and reported its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million[^c20]. On June 1, 2026, the company filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC, initiating the process toward an initial public offering[^c17].
In June 2026, Anthropic published a landmark report on recursive self-improvement, disclosing that as of May 2026 more than 80% of all code merged into its codebase was authored by Claude[^c18]. The company warned that full recursive self-improvement — AI systems autonomously designing their successors — could arrive within two years[^c22]. Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI Director, joined Anthropic in May to build a team using Claude to accelerate pretraining research[^c19]. The company simultaneously called for a global pause on frontier AI development, a proposal that became a trending topic on Chinese social media and drew accusations of regulatory capture alongside expressions of support.
In April 2026, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview, a frontier model capable of autonomously discovering and exploiting software vulnerabilities, and launched Project Glasswing, a defensive cybersecurity initiative. By May 2026, Mythos had identified over 6,200 critical vulnerabilities across more than 1,000 open-source projects[^c13], and the company stated it expected to release Mythos-class models to all customers "in the coming weeks"[^c12]. Project Glasswing expanded from 50 to approximately 200 partner organizations across 15 countries in June[^c21]. The announcement of Mythos triggered significant financial and regulatory responses: the S&P 500 Software & Services Index dropped 25.5%[^c8], central banks in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan convened emergency discussions[^c9][^c10][^c11], and US Cyber Command and the NSA formed a joint task force to study safe deployment of frontier AI[^c16]. In May 2026, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8, an upgrade to its flagship model with improved honesty metrics — roughly four times less likely to let code flaws pass unremarked — and safety alignment approaching that of Mythos Preview[^c14][^c23]. The company's run-rate revenue exceeded $30 billion by April 2026[^c15].
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]. In January 2026, the company published a new constitution for Claude, replacing earlier rule-based guidelines with a virtue ethics framework[^c4].