How Claude Was Founded and Evolved Into a Leading AI Assistant
- Graziano Stefanelli
- Sep 20
- 4 min read
Claude, the AI assistant developed by Anthropic, has rapidly become one of the most respected tools in the conversational AI space. While ChatGPT by OpenAI was the first to achieve mass popularity, Claude distinguishes itself through a unique founding philosophy, deep focus on alignment and safety, and technical innovations rooted in Constitutional AI. Understanding how Claude was created requires tracing back to Anthropic’s origins and the motivations that led to its development.
The founding of Anthropic came from concerns over AI safety
Claude is the flagship product of Anthropic, an AI safety and research company founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers. The founding team was led by Dario Amodei, who had previously served as VP of Research at OpenAI.
Dario and several colleagues left OpenAI after differences in vision, particularly regarding how fast AI models were being developed and commercialized versus the level of alignment and safety built into them. These concerns, especially around the unpredictability and risks of large language models, led to the creation of a new company—one that would emphasize interpretable, steerable, and safer AI systems.
Other notable Anthropic co-founders include:
Daniela Amodei, COO and President (formerly at OpenAI)
Tom Brown, lead engineer behind GPT-3
Jared Kaplan, lead scientist with deep academic and theoretical AI knowledge
The company was founded with a mission to research and build reliable, steerable AI systems that serve humanity, and its early funding came from significant players including Alameda Research (tied to FTX) and later high-profile investors like Google, Salesforce, and Amazon.
Claude’s development was guided by Constitutional AI
What made Claude stand out from the beginning was not just its capabilities, but its design philosophy. Anthropic’s most important innovation is a technique called Constitutional AI.
Instead of relying entirely on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) as OpenAI did with ChatGPT, Claude is trained to follow a set of written ethical principles—its “constitution.” These principles guide the model in how to respond in safe, helpful, and honest ways.
This approach allows Claude to:
Self-critique and revise its responses during training
Reduce reliance on constant human intervention
Align with broader values such as transparency, non-maleficence, and autonomy
This core philosophy continues to shape Claude’s evolution, with each generation of the model improving in truthfulness, reasoning, and ethical decision-making.
The Claude family of models launched in 2023 and quickly gained traction
Anthropic named its AI assistant Claude in honor of Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. The first version, Claude 1, was released in March 2023, initially to enterprise partners and developers.
Its success led to rapid iterations:
Claude 1.3: Improved context handling and memory.
Claude 2 (July 2023): Added public chat interface, support for file uploads, and better performance in reasoning and coding.
Claude 2.1 (November 2023): Introduced a 200,000-token context window, enabling long document analysis and codebase handling.
Each version emphasized natural language fluency, multi-step reasoning, and reliability. Unlike many competitors, Claude was praised for giving sober, clear, and structured answers without hallucination-prone shortcuts.
Claude 3 established Anthropic as a leading contender
The Claude 3 model family launched in March 2024, introducing three versions:
Claude 3 Opus became the first model widely considered a true competitor to GPT-4 in both academic benchmarks and real-world usage. With its long context window, ability to analyze entire PDFs, inline citations, and measured tone, Opus began being adopted by professionals in legal, academic, financial, and technical fields.
The Claude 3 series solidified Anthropic’s identity as a safety-first, high-performance AI company trusted by institutions needing structured, accurate outputs.
And other models have been launched after that...
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Availability and integrations expanded rapidly
Claude models are now accessible through:
Claude.ai: The public web interface
Anthropic API: Used by developers and integrated into enterprise apps
Slack: Available as a bot for summarizing threads, writing messages, and managing conversations
Amazon Bedrock: Claude powers AI features in AWS-based applications
Notion AI, Quora Poe, Zoom AI Companion, and others
The model is available in free and Pro tiers, with Claude Sonnet powering the free tier and Claude Opus powering the Pro version.
Anthropic remains focused on safety and long-term alignment
Unlike competitors that emphasize product feature races, Anthropic continues to frame its growth around AI safety research and societal alignment. Its most recent papers and projects focus on:
Mechanistic interpretability: Understanding how models form beliefs internally
Scalable oversight: Training AIs to critique each other and provide higher-quality feedback
Constitution refinement: Making Claude’s principles even more transparent and globally representative
By investing heavily in research transparency, robustness, and ethical alignment, Anthropic is trying to ensure that Claude not only performs well, but that it evolves responsibly—especially as models approach superhuman capability.
Claude’s founding represents a different path in AI
Claude was not born from hype or viral adoption. It emerged from a break in ideology, where a team of experienced researchers decided to build a model that placed trust, reliability, and safety at the forefront.
This vision—executed through Constitutional AI, long-context capabilities, and enterprise-grade reasoning—has positioned Claude as a serious alternative to ChatGPT. It continues to lead in specific domains such as document-heavy work, research-intensive tasks, and ethical conversational design, all while being guided by a foundational commitment to human-centered AI development.
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