Partnering with Anthropic: Advancing Safe, Steerable AI for the Enterprise

Every era of technology reaches a defining moment that shifts the arc of progress, when enormous possibility on the horizon becomes real in the present. For AI, that moment is now.

That is why we are grateful to partner with Anthropic and lead the company’s Series F, supporting their mission to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI.

In our lifetimes, we have seen platform shifts that reshaped the global economy – the rise of the Internet, the ubiquity of mobile, and the scale of the cloud – each fundamentally transforming how people and businesses engage with the world. But AI marks something fundamentally different: a platform capable of intelligence, which we believe is the most consequential technology of this modern epoch. 

AI has advanced at an unprecedented pace with the fastest rate of adoption of any technology before it. We have already seen it redefine how companies innovate, solve problems, and deliver value, accelerating hours of work into minutes and creating an exponential force multiplier for what teams can achieve. The technology rapidly emerged from research labs and is now embedded in core production workflows, accelerating the speed of action and creating significant competitive advantages for the individuals and companies that adopt it.

“I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be,” ¹ Dario Amodei, CEO and Co-Founder, Anthropic

We believe Anthropic is at the forefront of this shift, and that it has set a new standard for trusted frontier models for businesses: intelligent systems that combine exceptional performance with the safety and reliability that global businesses demand. Anthropic’s Claude model has quickly become essential infrastructure for modern business, trusted by developers and business leaders to power their most mission-critical work and applications. Anthropic’s breakthrough models and product advancements have driven unprecedented growth and adoption at an unparalleled scale and the company has ascended to become the top player in enterprise AI.

Building Differentiated Value Across the Ecosystem and AI Stack

Since we first met Anthropic in early 2023, their team has always been focused on the vast developer and business opportunity in AI. Through its Claude models – accessible via Anthropic’s developer platform as well as Anthropic’s own applications – Anthropic helps enable everyone from individual developers to the world’s largest enterprises to start building with ease. Beyond accessibility, Claude stands out to us in many high-value domains such as coding, agentic workflows, and complex reasoning. This has driven fervent developer adoption and an inspired brand. From the start, Dario and the Anthropic team have intentionally focused on winning the hearts and minds of developers and builders, recognizing them as the heartbeat of innovation for companies.

With innovative capabilities such as memory, web search, prompt caching, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard, Anthropic empowers customers to develop production-ready AI applications and autonomous agents built for complexity and scale. Since its founding, Anthropic has also been a pioneer in advancing AI safety and reliability. This focus, combined with a deep understanding of the builder persona, is why more than 300,000 enterprise customers – from leading AI startups like Ramp and Legora to cloud-native companies like Lyft and Snowflake and to Global 2000 enterprises like Block and Thomson Reuters– trust Anthropic as their platform for building AI products. In today’s dynamic and rapidly evolving market, the customers we speak to are making large bets on trusted AI platforms, and we believe that Anthropic is increasingly earning that opportunity.

Over the past year, the company has also delivered applications like Claude for Enterprise and Claude Code, which we think demonstrates their ability to deliver value across the landscape, and translate frontier research into a vibrant ecosystem of leading products. We have seen tremendous enthusiasm among developers and technical leaders who call out Anthropic’s product taste, performance, and reliability as key differentiators. 

Anthropic has also built relationships with cloud hyperscalers like Amazon and Google, which provide powerful distribution channels through go-to-market collaboration and compute through their respective AWS and Google Cloud ecosystems. These partnerships also extend to hardware with AWS Trainium chips and Google Cloud TPUs, and, when coupled with Nvidia GPUs, make Anthropic the only frontier model company operating at significant scale across multiple clouds and chip platforms.

A Team and Mission We Believe In

Dario has always been an AI optimist at heart. His background in physics, neuroscience, and computational biology shaped his conviction that many of the world’s hardest challenges are beyond human scale and will require AI to help solve.

We resonated with Dario’s balance of deep understanding of AI research and capabilities along with clear-eyed recognition of potential pitfalls and risks. Prior to founding Anthropic, Dario led research at OpenAI. While there, in collaboration with his other future cofounders, he pioneered work on scaling laws, reinforcement from human feedback, GPT-2, and GPT-3 (which became ChatGPT). He and six other cofounders left to found a more focused bet on both the power of scaling and the need to ensure AI was developed responsibly and for the benefit of all of humanity. Guided by Dario’s prescient, technical, and visionary leadership, this core nucleus of exceptional talent has since attracted brilliant minds worldwide, resulting in one of the highest levels of talent density we have ever seen. We believe Anthropic’s impressive, mission-aligned team will continue to draw leading technical talent to extend their research and product leadership for years to come.

We have been fortunate to have known the Anthropic leadership team for many years and to witness firsthand their clarity and commitment to the mission of advancing AI responsibly. Along the way, we also introduced them to a diverse set of Fortune 500 executives, AI innovators, and global leaders, many of whom have since made Anthropic a cornerstone of their AI strategy. 

Looking Ahead

At ICONIQ Ascent, our recent CEO conference, Dario forecasted that the next few years represent a pivotal window for AI. We emphatically agree: AI is entering its defining chapter. We think Anthropic is leading the way, empowering builders, startups, and enterprises to harness frontier intelligence at scale to drive innovation and possibility across every industry. 

We are honored to partner with and support the entire Anthropic leadership team on their extraordinary journey. Together, they are pioneering reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems that we believe will transform industries – and society – in the critical years ahead.