Anthropic Founded

Infrastructure & Compute The Transformer Era

Impact

What Happened

Former OpenAI VP of Research Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, along with several other OpenAI researchers, founded Anthropic — an AI safety company focused on building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Why It Mattered

Created one of the leading frontier AI labs with safety at its core. Anthropic would develop Constitutional AI and the Claude model family, becoming a major force in responsible AI development.

Key People

Organizations

Anthropic

Related Milestones

2023.03Product

Claude: Constitutional AI

Anthropic released Claude, an AI assistant built with Constitutional AI (CAI) — a novel approach where the model is trained to follow a set of principles rather than just optimizing for human preference ratings. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers, positioned Claude as the safety-focused alternative.

Dario AmodeiDaniela AmodeiAnthropic

2015.12Infrastructure

OpenAI Founded

OpenAI was founded as a non-profit AI research lab with $1 billion in committed funding, aiming to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Co-founded by Sam Altman (Y Combinator president), Elon Musk, and top researchers including Ilya Sutskever from Google Brain.

Sam AltmanElon MuskOpenAI

2019.02Research

GPT-2: 'Too Dangerous to Release'

OpenAI announced GPT-2 (1.5 billion parameters) but initially refused to release the full model, calling it 'too dangerous' due to its ability to generate convincing fake text. The decision was controversial — some praised the caution, others called it a publicity stunt. The full model was eventually released in November 2019.

Alec RadfordOpenAI

2024.03Product

Claude 3: Approaching Human-Level

Anthropic launched the Claude 3 family (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus), with Claude 3 Opus matching or exceeding GPT-4 on most benchmarks. It featured a 200K token context window, strong reasoning, nuanced instruction-following, and a 'personality' that users found distinctively thoughtful and careful.

Anthropic

2025.01Product

Claude 3.5 Sonnet: A Leading Coding Model

Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet emerged as one of the strongest widely used models for coding tasks, with developers praising its code generation, debugging, and software engineering capabilities. It powered tools like Claude Code, enabling AI to work directly inside developer environments.