---
title: Anthropic
category: entity
summary: AI safety company, developer of Claude; major contributor to interpretability research
tags: [company, ai-safety, interpretability]
sources: 1
updated: 2026-04-10
---

# Anthropic

## What it is
AI safety company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers. Builds the Claude family of large language models and publishes research on AI safety, alignment, and interpretability.

## Why it matters
Primary source of modern mechanistic interpretability work, including the sparse-autoencoder line of research that this wiki is tracking.

## Key facts
- Founded 2021 — cited from [[sources/monosemanticity]]
- Publishes the Transformer Circuits thread (interpretability research)
- Runs the [[concepts/sparse-autoencoder]] line of work

## Related
- [[concepts/sparse-autoencoder]]
- [[synthesis/interpretability-overview]]

## Appears in
- [[sources/monosemanticity]] — primary SAE paper

## Open questions
- Has the SAE approach scaled beyond one-layer models as of late 2024?
