What Is Anthropic and Why Is Everyone Talking About It Now?

If you have been hearing the name Anthropic more often lately, it is not because it released yet another chatbot. It is because it is trying to turn AI from a “good answer machine” into something closer to a reliable colleague that can follow your organisation’s playbook, work inside your tools, and complete end-to-end tasks.

What is Anthropic?

Anthropic is a US AI company best known for building Claude, a family of large language models and assistant products. The company describes itself as an AI safety and research company working to build AI systems that are reliable, interpretable, and steerable.

That “safety and research” framing is not just marketing. It shows up in how Anthropic is set up, how it talks about governance, and how it tries to shape Claude’s behaviour.

Why Anthropic is structured differently

Anthropic is organised as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). In plain terms, a PBC is meant to balance shareholder returns with an explicit public-interest purpose. Anthropic states its purpose as the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity, and it publishes information about its governance, including board members.

This matters because the biggest debate in AI is not only “who has the best model,” but also “who sets the priorities when trade-offs appear” such as speed vs safety, capability vs misuse risk, growth vs control.

Claude: Anthropic’s main product line

Claude is the product most people recognise: an AI assistant that can write, reason, summarise, analyse documents, and help with coding. Anthropic’s direction in the last year has been to package Claude in different ways depending on how people work:

• Claude (chat) for everyday queries and writing
• Claude Code for developer workflows (coding and repo work)
• Claude Cowork for broader, non-coding “get work done” tasks inside the desktop app

In other words: same brain, different interfaces and permissions.

Safety as a design goal, not a footnote

Anthropic has publicly shared a “constitution” document describing the values and behavioural goals it wants Claude to follow, and it has explained its approach to “Constitutional AI.”

You do not need to read the whole document to understand the practical point: Anthropic wants Claude to be useful, but also consistently bounded by rules and intent, especially in sensitive areas. Whether one agrees with the philosophy or not, it is part of the company’s identity.

From chatbot to “Cowork”: what changed – Anthropic

Anthropic introduced Cowork as a research preview inside the Claude desktop app. The key difference is permission and agency:

• In Cowork, you can give Claude access to a folder on your computer.
• Claude can then read, edit, and create files in that folder, complete multi-step tasks, and keep you updated as it progresses.

Anthropic’s own examples include organising files, building a spreadsheet from screenshots, or drafting a report from scattered notes.

That is a meaningful shift. Once an assistant can touch files and workflows, it stops being “just chat” and starts becoming “operations.”

The newest move: plugins that turn Claude into role-based specialists

To make Cowork useful in real workplaces, Anthropic added a plugin system and open-sourced 11 starter plugins. These are designed to tailor Claude to specific job functions and workflows.

The 11 plugins include: Productivity, Enterprise search, Plugin Create/Customize, Sales, Finance, Data, Legal, Marketing, Customer support, Product management, and Biology research.

Think of plugins as “Claude + your playbook”:

• the commands you want it to run,
• the context it should always remember for that role,
• and the connectors it can use to pull the right information at the right time.

Simple examples

Example 1: Legal team handling an NDA flood

Instead of reading every NDA from scratch, a legal workflow can start with triage: flag unusual clauses, highlight deviations from the company’s preferred positions, and route only the tricky cases to counsel. Anthropic’s Legal plugin is explicitly positioned for contract review, NDA triage, and compliance workflows for in-house teams.

Example 2: A sales lead that needs context, not just a pitch

A sales workflow is rarely “write an email.” It is: research the prospect, understand the product fit, prepare call notes, and log follow-ups. Anthropic describes sales plugins as a way to connect Claude to a CRM and knowledge base and expose commands for prospect research and follow-ups.

Example 3: “Where is that file?” becomes one search box

Enterprise teams lose time hunting across email, chat, documents, and wikis. Anthropic’s Enterprise search plugin is positioned to pull information across company tools and docs so people can find answers faster.

Example 4: A data analyst who wants insights without wrestling with formatting

The Data plugin is framed around querying, visualising, and interpreting datasets. That is useful when the bottleneck is not math, but the time it takes to go from raw tables to a decision-ready summary.

The quiet enabler: Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Anthropic also open-sourced the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives (repositories, business tools, development environments).

This is one of the less glamorous parts of the story, but it is crucial. Assistants become dramatically more useful when they can securely access the right context, rather than guessing from generic training data.

What this means in the real world

Anthropic’s role is no longer limited to “a model provider.” It is positioning itself as a company that:

• builds frontier models (Claude),
• wraps them in tools that can do work (Cowork),
• and provides a framework to connect those tools to real systems (plugins + MCP).

That combination is why people are paying attention: it aims at the repetitive, high-volume parts of knowledge work where time, cost, and consistency matter.

The sensible caution: power needs guardrails

Cowork is designed so users choose what Claude can access, and Anthropic warns about risks such as unclear instructions leading to destructive actions and “prompt injection” attacks where content tries to manipulate an agent’s behaviour.

The healthy way to view this category is: delegate the first pass and the busywork, keep humans accountable for the final call.

Conclusion

Anthropic is not just “another AI startup.” It is a safety-focused AI company with a distinctive governance structure, best known for Claude, and it is now pushing beyond chat into role-based, workflow-driven assistants through Cowork and plugins.

If this direction succeeds, the big change will not be that AI can write faster. The change will be that routine work stops being a queue of small tasks and starts becoming a system that runs with fewer handoffs, less searching, and far more consistency.