From AI Future Debate to $965 Billion Business: The Story of Claude
OpenAI
Anthropic
Amazon/AWS
Google/DeepMind
The story of Anthropic and its Claude model began with internal disagreements at OpenAI over AI safety. Founded by Dario and Daniela Amodei, the company attracted early investment from Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX, then built a $965 billion business. Claude evolved from an experimental model to a corporate platform including Claude Code and Cowork, with backing from Amazon and Google.
Anthropic was founded in early 2021 by former OpenAI employees Dario and Daniela Amodei, who left the company due to disagreements over AI safety. The largest early investor was Sam Bankman-Fried from FTX, who invested about $500 million in a Series B round in April 2022. After FTX's collapse, Anthropic's stake was sold for $884 million. The first Claude models were introduced in March 2023, and in September 2023, the paid subscription Claude Pro was launched. In 2024, the Claude 3 family was released, and in 2025, Claude Max. The key product became Claude Code, launched in February 2025, which by February 2026 was generating annual revenue of over $2.5 billion. Anthropic develops enterprise tools including Cowork and earns revenue from API and subscriptions. The company partners with Amazon and Google for computing power: Amazon invested up to $8 billion, and Anthropic committed to spending over $100 billion on AWS technologies. By 2026, Anthropic's valuation reached $965 billion.
Source: Rusbase (RB.RU) —
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