Anthropic

Founded in 2021 by ex-OpenAI researchers including Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic is the "safety-first" AI lab that has raised over $7B from Amazon ($4B), Google ($300M), and Spark Capital. Its Claude model family — Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku — is widely regarded as the best at long-context reasoning, coding, and nuanced instruction following. The company's Constitutional AI approach to alignment has been adopted by governments and enterprises seeking controllable AI systems. At a $61B valuation, Anthropic is the world's second most valuable private AI company and the philosophical counterweight to OpenAI's more aggressive deployment stance.