Short answers, pulled from the story.
Anthropic was founded in January 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees, including siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. Dario had served as OpenAI's Vice President of Research. The founders departed over directional differences with their former employer.
Constitutional AI is a technique Anthropic developed to align Claude with human values. A document called the "constitution" defines how the model should behave; Claude 2's constitution draws from sources including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple's terms of service.
Anthropic released its first Claude models in March 2023, initially only to approved users. Claude 2 launched publicly in July 2023, followed by Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku in March 2024, Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024, and Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet in May 2025. The company announced a model called Mythos in April 2026.
Anthropic has raised multiple rounds of investment totaling tens of billions of dollars. A Series F in September 2025 raised $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation. A Series G on the 12th of February 2026 raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation, bringing the company's estimated value to $965 billion.
Music publishers including Concord, Universal, and ABKCO sued Anthropic on the 18th of October 2023, seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work. A separate class-action lawsuit from authors settled in September 2025 for $1.5 billion, roughly $3,000 per book, described as the largest copyright resolution in U.S. history.
The dispute centers on Anthropic's refusal to remove contractual limits on using Claude for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth set a deadline of the 27th of February 2026, which Anthropic rejected, and President Trump then ordered agencies to stop using Anthropic's models. A federal judge issued a temporary injunction on the 26th of March 2026, describing the government's conduct as potential First Amendment retaliation.