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

The primary industrial enterprise 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 surely’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 knowledge set of legal text to draft and negotiate contracts.

“We’re very fortunate to be Anthropic’s launch partner for the legal sector — the team’s concentrate on AI safety aligns with our ‘lawyer-in-the-loop’ software-as-a-service product — deliberately designed to administer the chance of even probably the most advanced models ‘hallucinating,’” Robinson said in an announcement.

Anthropic has been relatively quiet about its plans to productize its work within the generative text AI space, preferring as a substitute to concentrate on academic research. But late last yr, the corporate launched a closed beta for an AI system, called Claude, much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT that appeared to enhance upon the unique in key ways. Claude was created using a method Anthropic developed called “constitutional AI,” which goals to supply a “principle-based” approach to aligning AI systems with human intentions — letting AI much like ChatGPT reply to questions using a straightforward set of principles (e.g. avoid giving harmful advice) as a guide.

Preliminary impressions of Claude were good. But like ChatGPT, the system suffered from limitations, like giving dangerous answers to questions (e.g. tips on how to make meth at home) and making inconsistent, factually fallacious statements.

It’s unclear whether the model Robin’s using  Claude or some derivative — neither Robin nor Anthropic would say. And even after repeated prodding, Anthropic wouldn’t reveal what number of partners it’s currently working (or how they got here to work with them) with and what number of models it plans to confide in industrial usage.

But little doubt, Anthropic is feeling some type of pressure from investors to recoup the tons of of tens of millions of dollars that’ve been put toward its AI tech.

Most recently, Google pledged $300 million in Anthropic for a ten% stake within the startup. Under the terms of the deal, which was first reported by the Financial Times, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its “preferred cloud provider” with the businesses “co-develop[ing] AI computing systems.”

Anthropic wasn’t founded exclusively with a profit-driven mission. Dario Amodei, the previous VP of research at OpenAI, launched the corporate in 2021 as a public profit corporation, taking with him various OpenAI employees including OpenAI’s former public policy lead Jack Clark. Amodei split from OpenAI after a disagreement over the corporate’s direction, namely the startup’s increasingly industrial focus.

But AI systems are expensive to develop and maintain. Ballooning costs led Anthropic to pursue outside backing, including a $580 million tranche from a bunch of investors including disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, Jim McClave, Nishad Singh, Jaan Tallinn and the Center for Emerging Risk Research.

Whether startup partnerships — and Big Tech investments — denote a shift in Anthropic’s priorities isn’t yet clear. But what clear is that the corporate believes its technology is differentiated to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Cohere and AI21 Labs, all of which supply paid access to their text-generating AI via APIs.