What is Claude AI and Who Made It? Full History Explained (2026)

What is Claude AI and Who Made It? Full History Explained (2026)

In today's world, in the realm of AI, the most talked-about after ChatGPT is “Claude”. If you use any social media, you must have heard the name “Claude”. Today, we are going to talk about this “Claude”. how the idea came about, who created it, what it can do, and why it's different from all the other AI tools. You'll find the answers to all these questions in this blog.

We'll start with the basics and then move on to the advanced topics.

What is the company Anthropic, and what is its relationship with Claude?

What is Claude?

Claude is an AI that communicates with people via text, answers questions, creates research or documents for you, codes tools, websites or apps for you, analyses data and much more. It is a **Large Language Model

(LLM)**. This is a system trained on a vast amount of data from the internet to understand and respond in a human-like way.

What is Anthropic?

The company that created Claude AI is called Anthropic.

- **Anthropic** = The company that created Claude

- **Claude** = The AI product created by Anthropic

Let's take an example: just as Google created ‘Gemini’ and OpenAI created “ChatGPT”, Anthropic created ‘Claude’. I'm sure by now you understand everything about Anthropic and Claude.

When and how did Anthropic begin?

Anthropic was founded in January 2021; its founders are based in San Francisco, California (USA), where its main office is located. It is a ** as a **Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)**, a type of for-profit company that pledges to consider the public good alongside its own profits.

The main faces behind the founding of Anthropic are the sibling duo:

- **Dario Amodei** — is the CEO of Anthropic. He was previously the VP of Research at OpenAI.

- **Daniela Amodei** — Today, she is the President of Anthropic. She was previously the VP of Operations at OpenAI.

In addition to these two, there were seven other people who joined Anthropic.

- **Chris Olah** — Known for his work on the ‘interpretability’ of AI models.

- **Tom Brown**

- **Sam McCandlish**

- **Jared Kaplan** — A key mind behind Constitutional AI technology

- **Jack Clark** — An expert in policy and government relations

An interesting fact is that all of these people previously worked at **OpenAI** (the company that created ChatGPT).

How did the idea to create Anthropic come about?

Everyone must be wondering this; let's try to understand it more clearly.

When I was working at OpenAI in 2021, it struck me that AI was growing at a tremendous pace, but no one was paying attention to human safety or how to keep it under control. We technically call this the ‘Alignment Problem’. is called — that is, ensuring that whatever the AI does, it does not go against human values.

When these people began to realise this, OpenAI was rushing releases without fully understanding how dangerous it could become in the future. That's why they left OpenAI to found their own company — whose mission was: a ‘safety-first AI company’, meaning putting safety before speed and profit. This is why the idea for Anthropic was conceived and it was founded.

How did Claude get its name?

The name Claude is linked to Claude Shannon, who is known as the ‘father of Information Theory’. In 1940, he laid the mathematical foundation upon which today's entire digital world (computers, the internet, data communication) rests. By naming its AI after him, Anthropic demonstrated its focus on profound scientific rigour.

What is Constitutional AI? (Anthropic's greatest innovation)

Constitutional AI is a training method developed by Anthropic in December 2022, which makes AI models safe and helpful.

This process happens in 3 steps

1. The AI model is given a ‘constitution’ (a list of principles) — such as ‘Do not give harmful answers’, ‘Be honest’, ‘Respect human rights’.

2. The model checks its own answers and improves them according to these principles.

3. After this, reinforcement learning is carried out using feedback — this reduces human dependency.

This method is more scalable and transparent than RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback),

What has happened in Claude since 2023?

March 2023 - Claude was first launched to the public (Claude + Claude Instant)

July 2023 - Claude 2 launched — larger context window (~100,000 tokens) March 2024: Claude 3 family — Haiku, Sonnet, Opus tiers

October 2024: ‘Computer Use’ feature — Claude can perform actions by looking at the screen

2025-2026: Claude 4 family, Claude Code, Claude in Chrome, Artifacts, Excel/PowerPoint integrations

you are wondering what Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus are?

Some people are wondering what Haiku, Sonnet and Opus are. I've looked at them a little differently below.

What's the difference between Haiku, Sonnet and Opus?

Haiku — the fastest and cheapest, for simple tasks

Sonnet — Balanced — Speed + Intelligence

Opus — the most powerful, for complex tasks

All these names are taken from Japanese and English poetry.

How does Claude work?

The Claude model is built on a Large Language Model (LLM) that has been trained on a vast amount of text. After training, it generates a token for each word based on the model and provides a response.

Transformer Architecture

All modern LLMs (including Claude) are based on the Transformer architecture (introduced by Google's researchers in 2017). Its key feature is the ‘Attention Mechanism’ — the model can determine which words in a sentence are more closely related to each other.

What are Claude's main features?

Text Generation — blogs, emails, stories, scripts, it can generate all these texts

Coding — writing, debugging, and building projects. Claude is the fastest for this.

Data Analysis — analysing spreadsheets and CSVs, and creating charts.

Document Handling — creating and editing Word, Excel, PDF, and PowerPoint documents.

Web Research — getting up-to-date answers from live internet data.

Artifacts — displaying code, websites or diagrams in a sidebar

Vision — understanding images and screenshots

Computer Use / Agents — performing tasks automatically in tools such as browsers and Excel

Conclusion

In 2021, seven former OpenAI researchers founded Anthropic due to concerns about AI safety. They developed a technology called Constitutional AI, and launched Claude in March 2023 — named after Claude Shannon. Since then, Claude 2, Claude 3 (Haiku/Sonnet/ Opus), Computer Use, and Claude Code. Since then, the product has continued to advance with features such as Claude 2, Claude 3 (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus),

Computer Use, and Claude Code, and today Anthropic is one of the most valuable AI companies in the world.