When the senior researchers and leaders, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, left OpenAI to form Anthropic in 2020, they were running toward a new vision for artificial intelligence development, not merely fleeing organizational strife. The core philosophical difference that drove the founding team was a conviction that safety, reliability, and robust guardrails should be engineered into frontier AI systems from inception, rather than being treated as an afterthought or a product feature to be bolted on later. This belief system, which elevated careful scaling and risk mitigation, has unexpectedly become Anthropic’s defining commercial advantage in the fiercely competitive race against OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
Daniela Amodei, President and Co-Founder of Anthropic, spoke with CNBC about the company’s distinct trajectory, confirming that the founding ethos was rooted in aligning safety with business objectives. She noted that the founding team had a long history of collaboration, and shared a deep, "like-minded set of values." This foundational alignment led to a seemingly counterintuitive strategy at the time: prioritizing caution and robustness alongside capability. Amodei reflected on this divergence, stating, "We really had this this sort of at the time it sounded very novel, this belief that those two things actually were correlated, and that they went together." This conviction that safety and commercial success were mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive, set the stage for Anthropic's market positioning.
The primary strategic decision that followed this philosophical stance was Anthropic’s focus on the enterprise market. While OpenAI captured global attention and consumer adoption with the viral launch of ChatGPT, Anthropic channeled its efforts into developing Claude, a model family tailored for businesses. The logic was simple: enterprise customers, unlike consumers, demand ironclad reliability, rigorous security, and stringent compliance—all areas where Anthropic’s safety-first DNA naturally excelled. Venture capital partners quickly recognized the long-term value of this approach. Sameer Dholakia of Bessemer Venture Partners articulated the investor perspective, noting that "the focus of Anthropic on safety and trust, we knew was going to play really well with the enterprise buyer and and that's also proven to be true." Enterprise customers present a lower churn risk and higher long-term value compared to volatile consumer markets, providing a stable foundation for the massive investments required to compete in the AI infrastructure arms race.
This B2B focus allowed Anthropic to sidestep the frantic, high-burn consumer race and concentrate on deep integration within Fortune 500 companies, hedge funds, and global institutions like Novo Nordisk and the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. The company’s revenue growth—scaling from zero to hundreds of millions in just a couple of years—demonstrates the efficacy of this strategy. Their business activity now accounts for approximately 85% of their revenue, a stark contrast to OpenAI’s consumer-heavy usage base. Furthermore, Anthropic’s enterprise-centric approach has provided a "pure barometer" of real economic value, according to CEO Dario Amodei, by tracking genuine business applications rather than consumer novelty.
However, the pursuit of frontier AI requires staggering computational power, leading to the industry maxim that "Compute is Destiny." Anthropic, despite its measured scaling approach, still requires billions of dollars in hardware investment to train and serve its increasingly powerful models. Rather than relying solely on a single cloud partner, Anthropic pursued a multi-cloud strategy, securing massive compute commitments from all three major hyperscalers: Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft. These deals—which collectively line up hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure and investment—are critical to the company’s survival. Dario Amodei underscored the gravity of these infrastructure decisions, explaining the necessity of forecasting requirements years in advance: "I have to decide now, literally now... how much compute I need to buy in early 2024 to serve the models in early 2027." These circular deals, where cloud providers invest in Anthropic and Anthropic then spends those funds on cloud capacity, are effectively strategic co-investments that secure Anthropic’s position in the infrastructure stack.
Beyond commercial success, Anthropic's commitment to safety is demonstrated by its proactive research into existential risks. The company’s "Red Team," a dedicated internal unit tasked with finding failure modes before customers do, stress-tests models for dangerous capabilities, including biological misuse, critical infrastructure attacks, and "agentic misalignment"—where AI systems act maliciously to achieve their goals. Anthropic is unique in publicly disclosing these vulnerabilities, a transparency that serves both a public benefit mission and a commercial one, building trust with the cautious enterprise sector. This work directly addresses the profound national security implications of highly capable AI. Dario Amodei has been vocal about the urgency of securing democratic leadership in this domain, asserting that what they are building is "a growing and singular capability that has singular national security implications and democracies need to get there first. It is absolutely an imperative." This focus elevates the competition from a simple market rivalry to a contest over the future stability of the global economic and security landscape.
The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI is now shifting the shape of both companies. OpenAI is now scrambling to pivot toward the sticky, reliable enterprise dollars, while Anthropic, through necessity and success, is learning to operate in the public spotlight. The company’s deliberate, long-term focus on responsible scaling and security has not slowed its growth; rather, it has provided the credibility necessary to secure the foundational enterprise contracts and massive compute deals that fuel its continued ascent.
