Anthropic launches Claude 1, a model TIME reports it finished in 2022 and held back
Anthropic launched Claude and the cheaper Claude Instant through an API on 2023-03-14, after a closed alpha with partners including Notion, Quora and DuckDuckGo (Anthropic); TechCrunch reported that…
- Date
- 14 March 2023
- Who
- Anthropic
- Confidence
- Medium (the hold-back account is company-claimed and rests on TIME's 2024 report
- Deep dive
- RLHF and instruction tuning (how base models became assistants)
Tier: Supporting · Significance: 3/5 · Org(s): Anthropic · Confidence: Medium (the hold-back account is company-claimed and rests on TIME's 2024 reporting and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's later remarks) Anthropic launched Claude and the cheaper Claude Instant through an API on 2023-03-14, after a closed alpha with partners including Notion, Quora and DuckDuckGo (Anthropic); TechCrunch reported that Anthropic asserts Constitutional AI is what sets Claude apart (TechCrunch; B05-21). TechCrunch reported a closed beta in late 2022 and a training-data cutoff of spring 2021. The "held-back" story is company-claimed. TIME's Billy Perrigo reported on 2024-05-30 that Anthropic finished training the first Claude in summer 2022 and that Amodei decided not to release it, continuing internal safety testing and wanting to avoid sparking a race to build ever bigger and riskier systems; ChatGPT launched roughly three months later, and TIME says the decision likely cost the company billions in lost opportunity (TIME, 2024-05-30). A February 2026 News24 report attributes the same arms-race worry to Amodei in an interview whose original venue and date it does not give (search results pointed to an interview with Ross Douthat, not confirmed) (News24, 2026-02-24). Neither source independently verifies the 2022 decision, and I found no contemporaneous 2022 Anthropic statement (the 2023-03-14 launch post frames nothing as a delay; Backlog). Interpretation: consistent with Anthropic publishing HH-RLHF (B05-14) while shipping no product, and with OpenAI's pace-setting launch (B05-20). Sources: Introducing Claude · TechCrunch · TIME, 2024-05-30 · News24