Anthropic acquires Opaque Systems, a confidential AI startup

Opaque originated as a research project at UC Berkeley’s RISELab a decade ago. Its founders include Ion Stoica, co‑founder of Databricks and Anyscale, and Raluca Ada Popa, an encryption and systems security researcher now at Google DeepMind. Aaron Fulkerson became CEO in October 2023. The firm turned its confidential computing research into production‑grade AI technology and later expanded to “verifiable AI,” providing cryptographic evidence of what ran, where, and under which policies.

Earlier this year Opaque raised a $24 million Series B round at a $300 million valuation, listing Anthropic, ServiceNow and Accenture among its customers. The acquisition could let Anthropic integrate Opaque’s confidential and verifiable AI capabilities into its own offerings, though the impact on Opaque’s existing customers has not been clarified.