Anthropic vs Scale AI: Founders, CEOs and History
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark and is led by Dario Amodei. Scale AI was founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang, Lucy Guo and is led by Francis deSouza.
Company facts
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.
Scale AI
Alexandr Wang
Alexandr Wang co-founded Scale AI in 2016 and was its CEO until June 2025. He led the move from self-driving data into language-model training data and U.S. defense work, and Forbes named him the youngest self-made billionaire in 2022.
Lucy Guo
Lucy Guo co-founded Scale AI with Alexandr Wang in 2016 and led early product and design work. She left in 2018 and later founded the venture firm Backend Capital and the creator platform Passes.
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
Scale AI
- Alexandr Wang2016–2025
Co-Founder, former CEO and Chairman
Co-founded Scale and ran it until June 2025, when he joined Meta; remains chairman of the board.
Source - Jason Droege2025–2026
Interim Chief Executive Officer
Former chief strategy officer and Uber Eats founder who led Scale through the post-Meta-deal restructuring.
Source - Francis deSouza2026–present
Chief Executive Officer
Former Illumina CEO and Google Cloud COO, appointed CEO effective August 10, 2026 to grow the applications business.
Source
Timeline: Anthropic and Scale AI side by side
2016Scale AI
Scale AI founded
Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo founded Scale in Y Combinator's S16 batch.
2018Scale AI
Lucy Guo departs
Co-founder Lucy Guo left the company.
2019Scale AI
Series C and unicorn status
Founders Fund led a $100 million round valuing Scale above $1 billion.
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.
2021Scale AI
Series E at $7.3 billion
Scale raised $325 million at a $7.3 billion valuation.
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.
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.
2024Scale AI
Series F at $13.8 billion
Accel led a $1 billion round with Nvidia, Amazon and Meta participating.
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.
2025Scale AI
Meta invests $14.3 billion
Meta took 49% at a valuation above $29 billion; Wang joined Meta and Jason Droege became interim CEO.
2025Scale AI
Layoffs
Scale cut 200 full-time staff and 500 contractors in July.
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.
2026Scale AI
Francis deSouza becomes CEO
The former Illumina chief took over on August 10, 2026.
Acquisitions
Anthropic
- Vercept2026Undisclosed
- Stainless2026Undisclosed
- Mendral2026Undisclosed
- Humanloop2025Undisclosed
- Bun2025Undisclosed
Scale AI
No verified acquisitions are listed.
Questions about Anthropic vs Scale AI
Who is the CEO of Anthropic PBC and Scale AI, Inc.?
Anthropic PBC is led by Dario Amodei and Scale AI, Inc. is led by Francis deSouza. Both serve as the top executive responsible for the company's strategy, operations, and financial performance.
When was Anthropic PBC founded vs Scale AI, Inc.?
Scale AI, Inc. was founded in 2016 — 5 years before Anthropic PBC, which was founded in 2021. Scale AI, Inc.'s longer operating history gives it a deeper track record but also potentially more institutional inertia compared to the younger Anthropic PBC.
How many employees does Anthropic PBC have compared to Scale AI, Inc.?
Anthropic PBC employs approximately 2,500 people, while Scale AI, Inc. employs approximately 1,200. Anthropic PBC has the larger workforce at 2,500 employees, compared to Scale AI, Inc.'s 1,200. 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 Scale AI, Inc. headquartered?
Both Anthropic PBC and Scale AI, Inc. are headquartered in United States, meaning they operate under the same primary regulatory and tax environment.
Who founded Anthropic PBC and Scale AI, Inc.?
Anthropic PBC was founded by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Jared Kaplan, Tom Brown, Chris Olah, Ben Mann. Scale AI, Inc. was founded by Alexandr Wang, Lucy Guo.
Which company has a longer operating history — Anthropic PBC or Scale AI, Inc.?
Scale AI, Inc. has been operating for approximately 10 years, making it the more established of the two companies. Anthropic PBC has been in operation for around 5 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 Scale AI overview