Anthropic

Ensuring transformative AI helps people and society flourish.

Feb 14, 2024

This article is part of a Brand Strategy column focused on uncovering the associations behind the world’s most disruptive brands. See all reviews

Anthropic was was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees who shared two strong beliefs: the importance of scale in Large Language models, and the understanding that with scale alignment and safety needed to be prioritized.

One of the foundational differences behind its main product, the chatbot Claude, is something called constitutional, a training method that aims to make safer modes by following an explicit set of principles versus the standard reinforcement learning from human feedback. This makes Claude more transparent, reliable, and easier to control than its competitor ChatGPT.

The brand identity was developed by the Portland based Geist, who partnered early with Anthropic to craft everything, from the visual identity to the brand experience.

When it comes to the brand framework, as a challenger in the market, Anthropic could have taken a bolder stance, even if safety and altruism seems more fitting for them than for OpenAI.

Brand Mission (Why we exist):

To ensure transformative AI helps people and society flourish.

Brand Values (Who we are):

Here for the mission
Anthropic exists for our mission: to ensure transformative AI helps people and society flourish. Progress this decade may be rapid, and we expect increasingly capable systems to pose novel challenges. We pursue our mission by building frontier systems, studying their behaviors, working to responsibly deploy them, and regularly sharing our safety insights. We collaborate with other projects and stakeholders seeking a similar outcome.

Unusually high trust
Our company is an unusually high trust environment: we assume good faith, disagree kindly, and prioritize honesty. We expect emotional maturity and intellectual openness. At its best, our trust enables us to make better decisions as an organization than any one of us could as individuals.

One big team
Collaboration is central to our work, culture, and value proposition. While we have many teams at Anthropic, we feel the broader sense in which we are all on the same team working together towards the mission. Leadership sets the strategy, with broad input from everyone, and trusts each piece of the organization to pursue these goals in their unique style. Individuals commonly contribute to work across many different areas.

Make something people love
Our technology and products should have a transformatively positive effect on people’s lives.

Do the simple thing that works
We celebrate trying the simple thing before the clever, novel thing. We embrace pragmatism - sensible, practical approaches that acknowledge tradeoffs. We love empiricism - finding out what actually works by trying it - and apply this to our research, our engineering and our collaboration. We aim to be open about what we understand and what we don’t.

Description (What we do):

Making AI systems you can rely on
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company. We build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems that benefit people around the globe.

Brand Personality (How we express ourselves):

Human warmth

Technically refined

Charmingly quirky

“Company”, Anthropic, accessed February 8, 2023, https://anthropic.com/company

“Anthropic”, Geist, accessed February 8, 2023, https://geist.co/work/anthropic