Anthropic vs Perplexity: Founders, CEOs and History
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark and is led by Dario Amodei. Perplexity was founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and is led by Aravind Srinivas.
Company facts
Anthropic
- Founded
- 2021
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Current CEO
- Dario Amodei
- Employees
- 2,500
Perplexity
- Founded
- 2022
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Current CEO
- Aravind Srinivas
- Employees
- 1,300
Founders
Anthropic
Dario Amodei
Dario Amodei is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Anthropic PBC. He previously served as Vice President of Research at OpenAI, directing the teams that built GPT-2 and GPT-3 and the scaling law research that still shapes how frontier models are planned…
Daniela Amodei
Daniela Amodei is co-founder and President of Anthropic PBC, responsible for the commercial and operating side of the company: go-to-market, finance, people, investor relations and public benefit compliance.
Jack Clark
Jack Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic and its head of policy. Since March 2026 he has also led the Anthropic Institute, a think tank the company launched to study the effects of AI.
Sam McCandlish
Sam McCandlish is a co-founder of Anthropic and a researcher known for work on the scaling laws of neural networks. At OpenAI he co-authored research showing a predictable relationship between training compute and model performance.
Jared Kaplan
Jared Kaplan is a co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Anthropic. He was a lead author of 'Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models' in 2020, which showed that model loss falls predictably as compute, data and parameter count increase.
Tom Brown
Tom Brown is a co-founder of Anthropic and was the lead author of the 2020 GPT-3 paper 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners' at OpenAI, which showed that large language models can handle many tasks from a few examples without task-specific fine-tuning.
Chris Olah
Chris Olah is a co-founder of Anthropic and leads its interpretability research, which works out which internal features and circuits drive a model's behaviour.
Ben Mann
Ben Mann is a co-founder of Anthropic and one of the authors of OpenAI's 2020 GPT-3 paper 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners'. At Anthropic he has worked on training and aligning the Claude models and on the practices that govern how they are released.
Perplexity
Aravind Srinivas
Aravind Srinivas co-founded Perplexity in 2022 and has been CEO since then. Before that he was a research scientist at OpenAI, working on generative models and reinforcement learning.
Denis Yarats
Denis Yarats is Perplexity's co-founder and CTO. He leads the engineering behind its retrieval, ranking and model stack, including the Sonar models offered through the developer API.
Johnny Ho
Johnny Ho is a Perplexity co-founder who has focused on product and search quality. He has been described in company materials as Chief Strategy Officer.
Andy Konwinski
Andy Konwinski is a Perplexity co-founder and board member who brought experience scaling an enterprise data company at Databricks. He also co-founded the Laude Institute, which funds AI research.
CEOs and their tenures
Anthropic
- Dario Amodei2021–present
Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder
Co-founded Anthropic in January 2021 and has run it since. Revenue reached $4.59 billion in 2025 and an annualized run-rate of about $65 billion by July 2026, and the company was valued at $965 billion post-money in its May 2026 Series H.
Source
Perplexity
- Aravind Srinivas2022–present
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Has led Perplexity since founding, through its funding rounds and the launches of Comet and Computer.
Source - Denis Yarats2022–present
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
Leads engineering for search, retrieval and the Sonar models.
Source
Timeline: Anthropic and Perplexity side by side
2021Anthropic
Anthropic founded by former OpenAI staff
Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and five other former OpenAI employees incorporated Anthropic on January 26, 2021, and raised a $124 million Series A in May 2021 led by Jaan Tallinn.
2022Anthropic
$580 million round and the first Claude held back
Anthropic raised $580 million in April 2022, including $500 million from FTX. It finished training the first version of Claude that summer but did not release it, citing further safety testing.
2022Anthropic
Constitutional AI published
Anthropic published Constitutional AI, a training method in which the model critiques and revises its own answers against a written set of principles instead of relying only on human ratings.
2022Perplexity
Perplexity founded
Incorporated August 22, 2022; launched its cited answer engine in December.
2023Anthropic
Claude and Claude 2 released
Claude and Claude Instant were released in March 2023 to approved users, and Claude 2 opened to the public in July 2023.
2023Anthropic
Amazon and Google take stakes
Amazon announced a strategic collaboration in September 2023 with an initial $1.25 billion investment and AWS as primary cloud provider. Google invested $500 million in October 2023 and committed $1.5 billion more over time.
2024Anthropic
Claude 3 family and Claude 3.5 Sonnet
Anthropic released Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet and Haiku on March 4, 2024, then Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024, which became the default model inside many AI coding tools.
2024Anthropic
Amazon investment reaches $8 billion
Amazon invested a further $4 billion in November 2024, taking its total to $8 billion. Anthropic named AWS its primary training partner and agreed to train on AWS Trainium chips.
2024Perplexity
$520M valuation with Jeff Bezos and Nvidia
January 2024 round led by IVP valued the company at $520M.
2024Perplexity
$3B then $9B valuation
June 2024 round at $3B; $500M raised at $9B in December 2024.
2025Anthropic
Claude 4 and Claude Code general availability
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 in May 2025 at its first developer conference, and made the Claude Code command line agent generally available the same month.
2025Anthropic
$1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors
Anthropic agreed in September 2025 to pay $1.5 billion, about $3,000 per book, to settle the Bartz class action over pirated books used in training. A judge granted final approval on July 20, 2026.
2025Anthropic
Google TPU deal for up to one million chips
In October 2025 Anthropic agreed to expand its use of Google Cloud to as many as one million TPUs, adding well over a gigawatt of capacity in 2026.
2025Anthropic
Microsoft and NVIDIA commit up to $15 billion
In November 2025 NVIDIA committed up to $10 billion and Microsoft up to $5 billion, while Anthropic agreed to buy about $30 billion of Azure compute and put Claude on Azure Foundry.
2025Anthropic
Bun acquired as Claude Code passes $1 billion run-rate
Anthropic acquired Bun, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime behind Claude Code and the Claude Agent SDK, in December 2025, and said Claude Code had reached $1 billion of run-rate revenue.
2025Perplexity
Comet launched; $20B valuation
Comet browser launched July 2025; $200M raised at $20B in September 2025.
2026Anthropic
Series G of $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation
Anthropic raised $30 billion in February 2026 led by GIC and Coatue at a $380 billion post-money valuation, and reported run-rate revenue of $14 billion and more than 500 customers spending over $1 million a year.
2026Anthropic
Pentagon dispute over surveillance and weapons limits
Anthropic refused Department of Defense demands in February 2026 to drop restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
2026Anthropic
Series H of $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation
Anthropic raised $65 billion in May 2026 led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia at a $965 billion post-money valuation, and said run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion that month.
2026Anthropic
Confidential draft S-1 submitted to the SEC
On June 1, 2026 Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 for a proposed initial public offering of common stock.
2026Anthropic
Claude Opus 5 and Opus 5.5 released
Claude Opus 5 replaced Opus 4.8 as the flagship in July 2026, and Opus 5.5 followed on September 22, 2026 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, about 40 percent cheaper to run than Opus 5.
2026Anthropic
IPO prospectus figures reported
Reporting on the draft prospectus in late September 2026 disclosed 2025 revenue of $4.59 billion, an $8.06 billion operating loss, a $41.97 billion net loss and about $518 billion of long-term compute commitments.
2026Perplexity
Microsoft Azure deal and Computer launch
Three-year ~$750M Azure agreement (January) and Computer agent launch (February).
2026Perplexity
Ninth Circuit vacates Amazon injunction
August 4, 2026 ruling lets Comet's shopping agent keep operating on Amazon while the case continues.
2026Perplexity
HP preload and Crusoe compute deal
Announced September 15, 2026.
Acquisitions
Anthropic
- Vercept2026Undisclosed
- Stainless2026Undisclosed
- Mendral2026Undisclosed
- Humanloop2025Undisclosed
- Bun2025Undisclosed
Perplexity
No verified acquisitions are listed.
Questions about Anthropic vs Perplexity
Who is the CEO of Anthropic PBC and Perplexity AI, Inc.?
Anthropic PBC is led by Dario Amodei and Perplexity AI, Inc. is led by Aravind Srinivas. Both serve as the top executive responsible for the company's strategy, operations, and financial performance.
When was Anthropic PBC founded vs Perplexity AI, Inc.?
Anthropic PBC was founded in 2021 — 1 year before Perplexity AI, Inc., which was founded in 2022. Anthropic PBC's longer operating history gives it a deeper track record but also potentially more institutional inertia compared to the younger Perplexity AI, Inc..
How many employees does Anthropic PBC have compared to Perplexity AI, Inc.?
Anthropic PBC employs approximately 2,500 people, while Perplexity AI, Inc. employs approximately 1,300. Anthropic PBC has the larger workforce at 2,500 employees, compared to Perplexity AI, Inc.'s 1,300. A higher headcount does not necessarily imply greater efficiency — it often reflects differences in business model (e.g., manufacturing vs. software).
Where are Anthropic PBC and Perplexity AI, Inc. headquartered?
Both Anthropic PBC and Perplexity AI, Inc. are headquartered in United States, meaning they operate under the same primary regulatory and tax environment.
Who founded Anthropic PBC and Perplexity AI, Inc.?
Anthropic PBC was founded by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Jared Kaplan, Tom Brown, Chris Olah, Ben Mann. Perplexity AI, Inc. was founded by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, Andy Konwinski.
Which company has a longer operating history — Anthropic PBC or Perplexity AI, Inc.?
Anthropic PBC has been operating for approximately 5 years, making it the more established of the two companies. Perplexity AI, Inc. has been in operation for around 4 years. A longer operating history often signals greater institutional resilience and brand recognition, though it can also mean slower adaptation to new market conditions.
Figures come from each company's filings and the sources linked beside them. Amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Back to the Anthropic vs Perplexity overview