Claude is the flagship AI assistant and large language model family created by Anthropic, a public benefit corporation focused on building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Claude product line includes powerful text and multimodal models (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku) that can draft and edit content, write and debug code, summarize and analyze large documents, and orchestrate complex workflows. Users can access Claude through consumer subscriptions (Free, Pro, Max), business plans (Team, Enterprise), native desktop and mobile apps, and a high-scale API and developer platform.
Anthropic itself was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company has grown rapidly to around 2,300 employees and has raised tens of billions of dollars in venture and strategic funding, making it one of the most valuable private AI companies in the world. Its research background includes foundational work on constitutional AI, alignment, interpretability, and long-context training, which directly informs how Claude is designed and deployed.
Claude has become a core tool for organizations that want strong reasoning capability, long-context document and code handling, and robust safety guardrails. Enterprises adopt Claude both through Anthropic’s own platform and via cloud marketplaces like AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI, as well as deep partnerships with companies such as Salesforce, Microsoft, and Accenture. These partnerships extend Claude into CRM, productivity, and developer tooling environments, embedding the assistant directly into daily work.
Anthropic positions Claude as a safer, more governable alternative to general-purpose LLMs, with a strong emphasis on compliance (including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA-configurable offerings), admin controls, and policy tooling for regulated industries. At the same time, the consumer and team editions of Claude aim to make advanced AI broadly accessible, providing an approachable interface that individuals and small teams can use for everyday writing, coding, analysis, and creative tasks.