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Anthropic is founded

Dario and Daniela Amodei lead a group from OpenAI to start a safety-focused laboratory, raising $124 million; the scaling and alignment researchers get a company of their own.

category
culture
significance
2 of 5
people
Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jared Kaplan, Chris Olah
organisations
Anthropic

what had to happen · 46 events back to 1943

Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. The organism has the same path lit. Direct influences are marked.

00 · One neuron · 1

  1. 1943A logical calculus of nervous activity

I · Foundations · 9

  1. 1948A mathematical theory of communication
  2. 1949Cells that fire together wire together
  3. 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
  4. 1958The perceptron learns
  5. 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
  6. 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
  7. 1965Moore's law
  8. 1969Perceptrons
  9. 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation

W1 · The first winter · 2

  1. 1974Werbos applies backpropagation to neural networks
  2. 1980The Neocognitron

II · Connection · 3

  1. 1982The Hopfield network
  2. 1985The Boltzmann machine
  3. 1986Backpropagation

W2 · The second winter · 6

  1. 1988Temporal-difference learning
  2. 1989Q-learning
  3. 1989LeNet reads handwritten postcodes
  4. 1990Finding structure in time
  5. 1991The vanishing gradient problem
  6. 1992TD-Gammon reaches world-class backgammon

III · Statistics and data · 10

  1. 1997Long short-term memory
  2. 1998MNIST and LeNet-5
  3. 1999The first GPU
  4. 2003A neural probabilistic language model
  5. 2006Deep belief networks and the word 'deep'
  6. 2007CUDA
  7. 2009Deep learning moves to GPUs
  8. 2009ImageNet
  9. 2010Rectified linear units
  10. 2010DeepMind is founded

IV · Deep learning · 11

  1. 2012Google Brain's network discovers cats
  2. 2012Dropout
  3. 2012AlexNet wins ImageNet
  4. 2013Deep Q-networks play Atari
  5. 2014Google buys DeepMind
  6. 2014Superintelligencedirect
  7. 2014Attention
  8. 2014Sequence to sequence learning
  9. 2015Batch normalisation
  10. 2015Residual networks
  11. 2015OpenAI is foundeddirect

V · Transformers · 4

  1. 2017Attention is all you need
  2. 2018GPT: generative pre-training
  3. 2019GPT-2 and the model too dangerous to release
  4. 2020Scaling laws for neural language modelsdirect

Anthropic was announced on 28 May 2021 with $124 million in funding and eleven founders, most of whom had left OpenAI at the end of 2020. Dario Amodei had led OpenAI's research, including GPT-2 and GPT-3, and Jared Kaplan had written the scaling laws; Chris Olah had led interpretability work at Google and OpenAI. The company described itself as an AI safety and research company and said it would build reliable, interpretable and steerable systems, and study frontier models to understand them.

Its founding thesis was that the same organisation should be at the frontier and be focused on safety, because safety research needed the most capable models to study, and because someone at the frontier had to be. Critics called this a contradiction; the company called it the only workable position. It structured itself as a public-benefit corporation with a trust intended to hold the founders to the mission.

Its first model, Claude, was released in March 2023, trained with a method the company called constitutional AI in which the model critiques its own outputs against written principles. By 2025 Anthropic was one of the three or four laboratories setting the frontier, and its founding is the origin of the safety vocabulary that governments adopted.

what it led to · 8 events downstream, through 2026

Built on it directly:

  1. 2023ClaudeVI
  2. 2026Claude Fable 5 and the Mythos classVII

And, through them, by era:

VI · Everyone · 3
  1. 2024Claude 3 catches GPT-4
  2. 2024Claude learns to use a computer
  3. 2024The Model Context Protocol
VII · Agents · 3
  1. 2025Claude 4 and Claude Code
  2. 2025MCP is donated to the Agentic AI Foundation
  3. 2026Claude Fable 5.1

sources · 1

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