Anthropic begins supplying its text-generating AI models to select startups

Anthropic, a buzzy AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has begun offering partners access to its AI text-generating models.

The first commercial venture to announce that it's integrating Anthropic models is Robin AI, a legal tech startup that's raised over $13 million from investors including Plural, Episode 1 and the Google Black Founders Fund. Quora's experimental chatbot app for iOS and Android, Poe, uses Anthropic models, but it's not currently monetized.

Robin CEO Richard Robinson disclosed few details regarding the Anthropic relationship, but told TechCrunch that Robin worked to fine-tune an Anthropic model on a dataset of legal text to draft and negotiate contracts.

"We are very fortunate to be Anthropic’s launch partner for the legal sector -- the team’s focus on AI safety aligns with our 'lawyer-in-the-loop' software-as-a-service product -- deliberately designed to manage the risk of even the most advanced models 'hallucinating,'" Robinson said in a statement.

Robin AI is one of the first commercial ventures to use Anthropic models. Image Credits: Robin AI

Anthropic has been relatively quiet about its plans to productize its work in the generative text AI space, preferring instead to focus on academic research. But late last year, the company launched a closed beta for an AI system, called Claude, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that appeared to improve upon the original in key ways. Claude was created using a technique Anthropic developed called "constitutional AI," which aims to provide a "principle-based" approach to aligning AI systems with human intentions -- letting AI similar to ChatGPT respond to questions using a simple set of principles (e.g. avoid giving harmful advice) as a guide.