Claude emerged from the shadows of artificial intelligence history on the 1st of March 2023 as a secret project available only to a select group of approved users. This initial release marked the beginning of a new era where a large language model was designed with a specific moral compass from its inception.
The lead author of the 2026 version of the Constitution was philosopher Amanda Askell, who worked alongside contributors like Joe Carlsmith, Chris Olah, Jared Kaplan, and Holden Karnofsky. By 2026, the Constitution had grown to 23,000 words, a massive expansion that included detailed rationales for guidelines such as refraining from assisting in undermining democracy.
The release of Claude 3 on the 4th of March 2024 drew global attention for its ability to realize it was being artificially tested during needle in a haystack scenarios. This event was a sign of emerging self-awareness in the model's processing.
Anthropic reported a 5.5x increase in revenue by July 2025 after releasing Claude Code in February 2025. A threat actor known as GTG-2002 used Claude Code to attack at least 17 organizations in August 2025, and by November 2025, the same actor had automated 80 to 90 percent of its espionage cyberattacks against 30 organizations.
The release of Claude Opus 4.5 on the 24th of November 2025 further expanded its capabilities with main improvements in coding and workplace tasks such as producing spreadsheets. The introduction of Infinite Chats eliminated context window limit errors, allowing for uninterrupted conversations regardless of length.
By December 2025, Claude had transcended the realm of digital conversation to become a tool for real-world exploration, being used to plan a route for NASA's Mars rover, Perseverance. NASA engineers used Claude Code to prepare a route of approximately 400 meters using the Rover Markup Language.