Claude AI is an artificial intelligence assistant created by Anthropic, a AI safety startup based in San Francisco.
Unlike many consumer AI assistants focused on narrow tasks, Claude is designed to be helpful, harmless, and honest across a wide range of conversations and use cases. In this article, we will explore the origins of Claude AI and dive deeper into the background, vision, and accomplishments of Anthropic’s founders.
Anthropic’s Founding Team
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Chris Olah, Sam McCandlish, Jack Clarke, and Jared Kaplan. This group of AI researchers and entrepreneurs shared concerns about the safety challenges emerging around artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems. They came together to build Anthropic focused on AI safety research and products designed to be robust and reliable.
Dario Amodei – CEO
As CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei oversees the company’s strategy, research directions, and product development. He studied physics at Cornell University before pursuing a Ph.D. in machine learning at Stanford University, where he researched ways to improve AI safety and reliability.
Dario previously conducted AI safety research at OpenAI and served as their Research Director. He has authored many influential papers on AI alignment, abstraction, model hacking, and more that established him as a leader in the field. Dario stands out for his nuanced perspective bridging theoretical and practical AI safety challenges.
Daniela Amodei – COO
Daniela Amodei serves as Anthropic’s COO, overseeing finance, people operations, legal strategy, and more. She studied economics at UPenn before earning an MBA from Stanford. Daniela gained business experience consulting at Bain & Company where she focused on tech and hardware companies.
At Anthropic, Daniela enables the research and engineering teams to operate effectively while ensuring alignment to the company mission. Her operational excellence helps scale Anthropic’s impact responsibly. She also spearheads fundraising, partnerships, and Anthropic’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Tom Brown – Research Scientist
As a founding member of Anthropic’s research team, Tom Brown develops techniques to improve AI safety and interacts with Claude regularly to provide user feedback. Tom studied computer science at Cambridge University before receiving a Ph.D. focused on machine learning and computer vision from Oxford.
He gained experience as a researcher at Google DeepMind working on image recognition models and achieved outstanding results benchmarking performance of convolutional neural networks. Tom is the author of many widely-used AI papers introducing innovations like GPT model finetuning. He won the 2018 Outstanding Paper Award at ICRA, a top robotics conference.
Chris Olah – Research Director
Chris Olah leads the Anthropic research team as Research Director, setting the company’s research strategy and goals. Chris studied theoretical physics and math in college before shifting his focus to AI safety. He previously helped lead AI safety efforts at Google Brain advancing interpretability of neural networks and adversarial robustness.
Known for his creative visual explanations of AI concepts, Chris co-authored seminal distill.pub articles on topics like attention and transformers that have been read by over a million people. He is an advocate for open access scientific communication to responsibly shape public understanding of AI progress.
Sam McCandlish – Research Scientist
Sam McCandlish co-founded Anthropic interested in finding practical solutions to AI safety challenges. He studied physics at Caltech before researching neuroscience computation as a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford.
Prior to Anthropic, Sam published pioneering work on AI alignment theory and assisted Chris Olah in building an AI safety research team at OpenAI. He facilitates research workshops bridging industry and academia like the AI Summer School he organizes with Owen Cotton-Barratt.
Jack Clarke – Head of Engineering
As Head of Engineering, Jack Clarke leads the development of Claude at Anthropic and ensures implementation aligns to safety priorities. He studied math and computer science at Cambridge University and worked as a software engineer at Google focused on infrastructure security and reliability.
Jack applies insights from his academic research on computer security and programming languages to help scale Claude responsibly. He pioneered techniques like statistical fuzz testing that are universally used to increase software robustness against risks like bugs or hacking.
Jared Kaplan – Strategic Advisor
Jared Kaplan serves as a Strategic Advisor at Anthropic, contributing his AI safety expertise and advising on research directions. He studied physics and math at Princeton University before earning a Ph.D. in quantum computing from the University of Maryland.
Jared’s pioneering research as Chief Scientist at O(1) Labs laid foundations for a new type of scalable and error-corrected quantum computing architecture. He co-authored influential papers on AI alignment concepts like Constitutional Law and is known for inventive cross-disciplinary perspectives connecting fields.
Vision for Beneficial AI
Anthropic’s founders were brought together by a shared motivation – ensuring AI safety efforts progress alongside rapid AI capabilities advances so the technology benefits humanity.
The risks posed by advanced AI systems failing catastrophically or behaving in unintended ways deeply concerned them. However, they saw most research focusing on making AI more powerful rather than robust, beneficial, and aligned to human values.
By focusing first on safety and reliability, Anthropic’s founders aim to develop AI assistants like Claude that behave as helpful partners to humans. They believe research and applications should proactively address risks like skewed incentives and enable wide access to AI’s benefits.
The founders expressed this vision for steering the progress of artificial intelligence towards prosperity in Anthropic’s Constitutional AI announcement. They outlined four key principles guiding their approach:
- AI should be safe, reliable, and do what users want
- AI shouldn’t infringe on basic liberties or undermine personal agency
- AI should benefit and empower as many people as possible
- AI progress should be the result of a transparent, open dialogue
By clearly articulating their intentions and research practices, they sought to establish ethical standards that earn public trust as AI capabilities grow more advanced.
Accomplishments So Far
Although still early days, Anthropic has already produced promising results showcasing their differentiated approach to AI safety challenges.
They introduced Constitutional AI as a novel technique where models predict regulation changes to their own design or training process. This builds in constraints for safely avoiding harmful behaviors aligned to core principles like avoiding dishonesty or harm.
Anthropic researchers have also published cutting edge papers on topics like auditing large language models to measure alignment with human values over time. Their techniques provide safety guarantees while maintaining helpfulness on challenging tasks.
The company recently open sourced the Constitutional Reader, a dataset for training language models to handle dangerous or unethical content safely. This enables further research by the AI community on reducing potential harms.
Most visibly, Anthropic released Claude as its first AI assistant product integrating a wide range of safety innovations tailored to conversational tasks. Initial reception highlighted Claude’s unusually consistent and benign behavior compared to other AI chatbots.
Looking Ahead
The coming years will prove pivotal in ensuring artificial intelligence and other powerful emerging technologies benefit humanity. Through their research and engineering efforts at Anthropic focused squarely on AI safety challenges, Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and the rest of Anthropic’s founders aim to positively influence this future.
By dedicating themselves to the mission of developing AI that is helpful, harmless, and honest for all, Anthropic’s founders have demonstrated inspirational leadership in responsible innovation for the common good. But their work has only just begun.
Sustaining safety while advancing capabilities remains an immense technical challenge for global society. The choices made today – what priorities AI progress focuses on, which applications adopt safety best practices, how policymakers and the public support valuable research – will resonate for decades or more.
Anthropic’s biggest tests still lie ahead as artificial intelligence continues marching towards human-level proficiency and beyond in the years to come. But based on their vision and accomplishments so far, humanity may just have an unlikely group of allies advocating through research and engineering to steer emerging technology towards prosperity.
Conclusion
In this article, we first explored the talented group of AI safety focused researchers and entrepreneurs who came together to found Anthropic – Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Chris Olah, Sam McCandlish, Jack Clarke, and Jared Kaplan. We dug into their backgrounds, experience, and perspectives that motivate their shared mission.
We then discussed Anthropic’s vision for Beneficial AI focused on principles like safety, reliability, empowering users and distributing benefits widely. We covered some of their research and engineering innovations so far making promising progress towards that vision through techniques like Constitutional AI.
And we considered the pivotal role Anthropic’s founders may play in wisely shaping the future societal impacts of artificial intelligence as capabilities advance. Though the ultimate influence of their work remains uncertain, they present an inspiring model for technology leadership focused on the common good rather than narrow interests.
As AI assistants like Claude become more widely used, we will learn more about Anthropic’s impact on steering progress in artificial intelligence towards benefit rather than unintended harms. But for now, their public-spirited mission and early safety innovations provide hope that humanity may avoid an AI apocalypse and instead realize an AI utopia.
FAQs
Who founded Anthropic and Claude AI?
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Chris Olah, Sam McCandlish, Jack Clarke, and Jared Kaplan. This team of AI safety researchers came together to create AI systems like Claude that are helpful, harmless, and honest.
When and why was Anthropic founded?
Anthropic was founded in 2021 out of a shared concern about AI safety challenges emerging around increasingly advanced AI systems. The founders aimed to steer AI progress in a beneficial direction through research and products focused on safety, reliability, and trustworthiness.
How did Claude AI get its name?
Claude is named after Claude Shannon, who founded the field of information theory which underpins modern AI. The name nods to Anthropic’s focus on mathematically proving safety properties aligned to human values.
What is Anthropic’s mission?
Anthropic’s mission is to ensure that artificial intelligence becomes beneficial for humanity. They conduct AI safety research and engineering focused on reliability, security, and ethics to create AI products like Claude that empower rather than undermine human agency.
What makes Claude AI unique?
Unlike most AI assistants designed for narrow tasks, Claude AI handles open-domain conversations while provably avoiding harmful, unethical, dangerous or illegal behavior through Constitutional AI. This safety-focused approach makes Claude uniquely trustworthy.
What safety innovations does Anthropic focus on?
Anthropic researchers pioneer techniques like Constitutional AI, model self-regulation through ethics labels, auditing language models over time for steering, and adversarially evaluating assistant performance on unsafe instruction detection.
Who funds Anthropic?
Anthropic is backed by leading investors including Open Philanthropy, Jaan Tallinn, Dustin Moskovitz, and Coinbase who share the company’s commitment to developing beneficial AI that avoids existential safety risks.
Does Anthropic share its AI safety research?
Yes, Anthropic researchers publish papers in top conferences and aim to set best practices in transparency to enhance accountability, oversight, and collaboration between industry, academia, and policymakers on AI safety.
