Anthropic PBC vs Alphabet Inc. (Google)

Dario Amodei was VP of Research at OpenAI in 2020, overseeing the development of GPT-3 — the most capable language model ever built at the time. He and a group of colleagues, including his sister Daniela, became increasingly concerned that OpenAI was prioritising commercial deployment over safety research. In December 2020, Dario, Daniela, and five other senior OpenAI researchers resigned. It was the largest talent departure in OpenAI's history.

Anthropic was founded in January 2021 with $124 million in seed funding and a stated mission: the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. The company developed Constitutional AI — a method for training AI systems to be helpful, harmless, and honest by having the AI evaluate its own outputs against a set of principles. Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, launched in March 2023 and was designed from the ground up with safety properties its founders believed were absent from competing systems.

Amazon invested up to $4 billion in Anthropic in September 2023. Google had previously invested $300 million. The investments valued Anthropic at approximately $20 billion and came with commercial agreements: Amazon would deploy Claude across AWS; Google would integrate Claude into its cloud offerings. Anthropic's run-rate revenue was approximately $87 million in January 2024. It would grow 345x in 28 months.

Anthropic launched Claude Code — an agentic AI coding tool — publicly in May 2025. By November 2025, Claude Code alone was generating over $1 billion in annualised revenue. By February 2026, that figure had reached $2.5 billion. Anthropic's total run-rate revenue hit $9 billion by end of 2025, $30 billion by April 2026, and $47 billion in May 2026. In February 2026, Anthropic closed a $30 billion Series G at a $380 billion valuation. In May 2026, it closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation. Salesforce took 20 years to reach $30 billion in annual revenue. Anthropic did it in under three years from a standing start.

Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO in June 2026, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley in early discussions for a potential public offering as early as October 2026. The company that had left OpenAI over safety concerns had built one of the most capable — and most commercially successful — AI systems in the world. Whether safety and capability were in tension, as Anthropic's founders had originally believed, or complementary, as its commercial success suggested, remained the defining question of the AI industry. Anthropic had made the question more precise. It had not yet answered it.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995. By 1996 they had built a search engine called BackRub — named after its method of analysing backlinks. It ran on Stanford's servers and consumed so much bandwidth that the university repeatedly asked them to take it down.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Google a cheque for $100,000 in August 1998 after a brief demo in a Stanford parking lot. There was one problem: Google Inc. didn't exist yet. Page and Brin had to incorporate the company before they could cash it.

In 1999, Page and Brin tried to sell Google to Excite CEO George Bell for $1 million. Bell turned them down — the search was too good, it would send users away from Excite's portal too quickly. Bell later called it the worst decision of his career. Excite filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Google became worth more than $2 trillion.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Google declared an internal "code red." The company that had invented the transformer architecture — the technology that made ChatGPT possible — had published its research openly and was now scrambling to compete with the system it had inadvertently enabled. Google rushed Bard to market. It made a factual error in its first public demo. The stock dropped $100 billion in a single day. Google's search share fell from 80% to under 70% as users migrated to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.

In September 2025, a U.S. federal court ruled that Google had illegally maintained its monopoly in search, ordering the company to end exclusive distribution contracts with Apple, device manufacturers, and browser makers. The Apple deal alone had been worth approximately $20 billion per year to keep Google as the default search engine on Safari. The court stopped short of forcing Google to sell Chrome or Android, but the ruling was the most consequential antitrust action against a technology company since the Microsoft case of 1998. Google announced it would appeal. The case is expected to reach the Supreme Court.