Anthropic Acquires Opaque Systems, Hires Its CEO and CTO

Anthropic has acquired Opaque Systems, a confidential-computing startup whose technology sits between AI models and the sensitive data they need to touch. SecurityWeek reports that financial terms were not disclosed, Opaque's website says the company "is winding down its operations," and the announcement says the team "is joining Anthropic to carry our work forward."

Opaque had expanded from protecting data in use to what it called verifiable AI, built around "cryptographic evidence of what ran, where it ran, and under what policies." Its own statement framed the pivot bluntly: "As AI evolved, so did the problem we set out to solve. Protecting data and models was no longer enough."

Not everyone from Opaque is making the trip. The New Stack describes the deal as a license-and-hire that brings over CEO Aaron Fulkerson, CTO Rishabh Poddar and a group of engineers, while leaving the corporate entity outside Anthropic's balance sheet.

The startup began as a UC Berkeley RISELab research project roughly a decade ago, co-founded by Databricks and Anyscale co-founder Ion Stoica and by Raluca Ada Popa, now at Google DeepMind. It raised a $24 million Series B this year at a $300 million valuation. Anthropic was already a customer, alongside ServiceNow and Accenture.

Opaque's contributions to open projects, including the Agent Governance Toolkit and TRACE (an open standard for AI runtime attestation), aren't addressed in the announcement. Impact on existing customers is left unclear.