Impressed by OpenAI ChatGPT but not too impressed by OpenAI? There are alternatives out there that don’t involve subscribing to Big Tech or Corporate America in the form of xAI’s Grok or Google Gemini.Anthropic is a new company, but its Claude AI is every bit as good, and it comes with a pledge of transparency and a bit more caution in considering the societal costs before unleashing new advances in its AI products.This is Claude’s origin storySiblings Dario and Daniela Amodei founded Anthropic in 2021, but before we go down the rabbit hole of Anthropic’s public policy and history, let me say that Anthropic’s Claude is a top-tier generative AI that can go toe to toe with ChatGPT.Anthropic just released Claude Sonnet 4.5 on September 29, a game of slight catch-up after OpenAI debuted ChatGPT-5 on August 7. I’ve been using them back-to-back for months, and while ChatGPT-5 felt like it’d pulled ahead of Claude Sonnet 4.0 for those eight weeks, Sonnet 4.5 restores the balance and has demonstrated itself to be roughly as capable.Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the version you get if you use the free version of Claude (or Perplexity Pro). Those who pay either $17 or $100 per month for Claude Pro or Max, respectively, get access to Claude Opus, a more advanced model than Claude Sonnet.Anthropic’s origin story begins at OpenAI. Both of the Amodei siblings were working there and slowly becoming more uncomfortable with OpenAI’s commercial designs.“In 2020, (Dario) Amodei and several colleagues discussed leaving OpenAI, which had just signed a $1 billion deal with Microsoft,” as reported by Time in a 2024 profile. “Amodei, then vice president for research, distrusted Altman and president Greg Brockman, according to one person who spoke with Amodei at the time. In late 2020, he and six senior staff resigned, and founded Anthropic in early 2021. Seven more OpenAI staff joined soon after.”Part of Anthropic’s founding DNA is that they pledge to “not to train or deploy models unless we have implemented adequate safeguards,” in contrast to what they point to as hasty progression among other AI companies.They also make attempts to be fairly transparent in the technologies and data that go into their models, as they release update notes for new versions of Claude. That doesn’t mean Anthropic has avoided the accusations of sucking up people’s content online on which to train its AI models. Only last month it agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle such a lawsuit.If you’re in the mood for a bit of reading, check out Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy, updated in October 2024, and transparency pledge in their own words.The post Looking for a Gentler ChatGPT Alternative? Meet Claude. appeared first on VICE.