What Is Anthropic? The Company Behind Claude and Claude Code

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that makes Claude, a family of AI models and the assistant apps built on them. It also makes Claude Code, an agentic coding tool, and introduced two open ideas that much of the agent world now uses: MCP and Agent Skills. Its identity is shaped by a strong focus on making AI systems safe, reliable and understandable.

This guide explains what Anthropic makes, what it is known for, and how you can put its models to work.

Anthropic in one paragraph

Anthropic builds large language models and the products around them. Its models are called Claude, and you can use them through the Claude apps on web, desktop and mobile, through a developer API, and through Claude Code in your terminal. Alongside products, the company publishes research on AI safety, including how to train models to follow principles and how to understand what happens inside them.

What Anthropic makes

Claude, the models

Claude is a family of models rather than a single one. Anthropic offers several sizes, from larger models for demanding work to smaller, faster ones for quick or high-volume tasks. All of them handle text, and they can also read images and documents.

Claude is often praised for careful writing, following detailed instructions and working through long, multi-step tasks. Like every language model, it can still make mistakes, so important output deserves a check.

The Claude apps

Most people meet Claude through its chat apps. You can ask questions, draft and edit writing, analyze files, brainstorm and work through problems. The apps also support projects and connections to outside tools, so Claude can work with your own material.

The developer API

Developers can call Claude models directly through Anthropic’s API and build them into their own products. Claude is also available through several major cloud platforms, which matters for companies that already run their infrastructure there.

Claude Code

Claude Code is Anthropic’s agentic coding tool. It works in your terminal, on your own codebase: it reads files, plans changes, edits code across many files and runs commands such as tests. You use it with a Claude account or an API key.

If you are new to it, start with what is Claude Code.

Open standards: MCP and Agent Skills

Two of Anthropic’s most influential contributions are not products you pay for but formats anyone can use.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

MCP is an open standard introduced by Anthropic for connecting AI apps to tools and data sources. Instead of every app building a custom connection to every service, a tool can expose itself once as an MCP server, and any MCP-capable app can use it. It has been adopted well beyond Anthropic’s own products.

Read the full explanation in what is MCP.

Agent Skills

Agent Skills are folders that contain a SKILL.md file: a short name and description, followed by instructions and, optionally, scripts or other resources. An agent loads a skill only when it is relevant, which keeps its working memory free for the task at hand. Anthropic introduced the format, and it has been adopted more widely since.

Learn how they work in what are Agent Skills.

What Anthropic is known for: safety research

Anthropic describes itself as a safety-focused company, and that shows in the research it publishes. A few themes stand out:

• Constitutional AI. A training approach where a model learns to follow a written set of principles, using those principles to critique and improve its own responses rather than relying only on human labels for every case.
• Interpretability. Research into what is actually happening inside a model, aiming to understand and eventually check its internal reasoning rather than treating it as a black box.
• Careful deployment. Publishing its thinking about how to evaluate risks before releasing more capable models.

You don’t need to follow this research to use Claude. But it explains why Claude tends to be cautious in certain areas and why Anthropic talks about safety so often.

How Anthropic compares with other AI companies

Anthropic keeps its Claude models closed: you use them through apps or the API, and the model files are not published. That puts it alongside OpenAI’s main models and Google’s Gemini, and in contrast to open-weight families such as Meta’s Llama, Google’s Gemma and many Mistral models.

Where Anthropic differs is in emphasis. Its products lean heavily toward work tasks such as writing, analysis and especially coding, and its open standards have shaped how many agents connect to tools. For a side-by-side view, see the big AI companies compared.

Using Anthropic’s models in AI agents

Claude is a common choice for AI agents, the systems that plan and carry out multi-step tasks rather than just answer one question. A few practical tips:

1. Pick the right size. Use a larger Claude model for complex planning and review, and a smaller one for routine or repetitive steps.
2. Write project instructions once. Claude Code reads instruction files in your project, so put your conventions there instead of repeating them.
3. Add tools with MCP. Connect the data sources and services your agent actually needs, and nothing more.
4. Package know-how as skills. If you repeat the same instructions, turn them into a skill the agent can load on demand.
5. Keep a human in the loop. Review changes, run tests and approve before anything important is merged or sent.

Claude also works well next to other models. BotQuarters lets you build a team of AI coding agents on your Mac where some teammates use Claude Code and others use Codex, Gemini, OpenCode or a local model, with your own accounts.

Common misconceptions

• “Anthropic and OpenAI are the same company.” They are separate companies with separate models and products.
• “Claude is one model.” It is a family of models of different sizes and speeds.
• “MCP only works with Claude.” MCP is an open standard, and many other apps and agents support it.
• “Safety focus means it can’t do much.” Claude is used for demanding real work, especially writing, analysis and coding; the safety focus shapes how it behaves, not how capable it is.

FAQ

What does Anthropic do?

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company. It builds the Claude family of models, the Claude apps, a developer API and the Claude Code coding agent, and it publishes research on making AI systems safer and easier to understand.

Is Claude made by Anthropic or OpenAI?

Claude is made by Anthropic. OpenAI is a separate company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models.

Is Anthropic’s Claude open source?

No. Claude models are closed: you use them through Anthropic’s apps, its API or supported cloud platforms, but the model weights are not published. Anthropic has, however, released open standards such as MCP and the Agent Skills format.

What is Anthropic known for?

It is known for the Claude models, for Claude Code, and for its focus on AI safety research, including Constitutional AI and interpretability. It also introduced MCP, an open standard many AI tools now use to connect to data and services.