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Our Culture, Values, and Talent

Anthropic was founded by a team of researchers who believe that the most consequential technology in history 
demands  an  organization  structurally  committed  to  both  capability  and  safety.  That  conviction  reaches  every 
dimension of the organization: how we hire staff, the research we perform, the policy positions we adopt, and 
the choices we make about the deployment of our models. As a result, we are able to achieve breakthroughs that 
we believe would be impossible in a culture where safety, model capability, and commercial success are treated 
as opposing forces.

All seven of Anthropic’s co-founders remain active leaders in the organization. It is uncommon to see this level 
of continuity among the founding team of a technology company, including other major frontier AI labs. The 
continuity reflects a genuinely mission-driven and high-trust team.

Our Culture

Several features of our culture are distinctive and difficult for any organization to replicate: 

• We Use What We Build. We are one of the most intensive users of our own technology. Over 90% of 
the contributions to our codebase in September 2026 were written by Claude, and Claude is embedded 
in  workflows  across  all  teams  at  the  company.  When  every  team  relies  on  the  product  daily,  the 
feedback  loop  between  builder  and  user  is  compressed:  deficiencies  can  be  found  rapidly,  and 
improvements are felt company-wide.

•

Researching  Both  Safety  and  Capability.  At  the  same  time  we  advance  frontier  AI,  we  develop  the 
policies and techniques designed to keep our models safe. We were the first frontier AI lab to adopt a 
formal  Responsible  Scaling  Policy  tying  safety  evaluations  to  capability  thresholds,  which  was  co-
developed  by  the  same  researchers  who  build  our  models.  Our  alignment  and  mechanistic 
interpretability  research  are  examples  of  active  scientific  fields  that  help  us  understand  ever-more-
capable versions of Claude.

• We Optimize for Talent Density. As of September 30, 2026, with approximately 5,300 employees, our 
TTM  revenue  per  employee  was  over  $6.6  million—a  reflection  of  extraordinary  talent  density  and  a 
culture built to compound it. Our employees are known internally as “Ants”—a nickname that captures 
the collaborative, ego-light culture of the team. Ants include many of the researchers and developers 
defining the frontier of AI, alongside proven operators across disciplines. Shared purpose paired with 
low  ego  translates  directly  into  less  organizational  friction  and  greater  impact  per  employee.  Claude 
compounds  that  impact  further:  Ants  use  Claude  across  every  function  to  take  on  work  that  would 
otherwise  require  substantially  larger  teams—allowing  us  to  remain  remarkably  lean  relative  to  our 
output.

•

Rigor  Applied  to  Every  Function.  A  majority  of  our  workforce  works  in  research,  engineering,  and 
product development. But the culture of intellectual rigor extends to non-technical functions as well: 
our  policy  team  publishes  detailed  policy  frameworks  and  proposals;  our  go-to-market  team  co-
develops  deployment  architectures  alongside  customers;  and  our  Applied  AI  engineers  sit  at  the 
frontier  of  what  is  possible  with  agentic  systems.  Our  teams  operate  in  a  truth-seeking  environment 
where the best argument wins, not the loudest voice or the most senior title. The result is a company 
where the distance between a research insight and a released product is unusually short.

Our Values

Our  values  guide  daily  decisions  across  the  company—from  hiring  and  research  prioritization  to  product 
development and customer engagement. We chose them because they reflect how we actually work:

•

Act for the Global Good. We strive to make decisions that maximize positive outcomes for humanity 
over the long run and are willing to take bold action to ensure our technology is a positive force. 

• Hold Light and Shade. We stay hopeful about what AI can achieve while remaining clear-eyed about 

what could go wrong. Both perspectives are essential, and neither can be sacrificed for the other.

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