Anthropic
The AI safety company behind the Claude model family, Claude Code, the MCP protocol, and the Agent SDK.
Definition
Anthropic is the AI lab that ships Claude (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus), Claude Code, Claude Desktop, the Model Context Protocol, and the Agent SDK. Founded in 2021, it positions its products around safety-first design and is the primary alternative to OpenAI for frontier-grade API access. Most agentic tooling in 2026 is built against the Anthropic API.
When to use
See also
- Claude Code — Anthropic's official terminal-based coding agent, with MCP support and a plugin ecosystem.
- MCP — Anthropic's open standard for connecting LLMs to external tools and data sources over JSON-RPC.
- OpenAI — The AI lab behind ChatGPT and the GPT model family; Anthropic's main commercial competitor.