Anthropic acquires confidential-computing startup Opaque Systems
Opaque grew out of UC Berkeley's RISELab. Its technology protects sensitive data with hardware and produces cryptographic evidence of how AI systems ran.
Anthropic has acquired Opaque Systems, a company whose technology lets AI systems use sensitive data while the underlying hardware keeps that data protected. Opaque announced the deal last week and said its team is joining Anthropic. Financial terms were not disclosed. Opaque began as a research project at UC Berkeley's RISELab about a decade ago. Its founders include Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and Anyscale, and Raluca Ada Popa, an encryption and systems security researcher who now works at Google DeepMind. Aaron Fulkerson became CEO in October 2023. The company turned its confidential computing research into technology used in production AI deployments, then expanded beyond protecting data and models. Opaque said organizations also needed to independently verify how AI systems and agents behaved. That led it to move "from confidential AI to verifiable AI," which it describes as replacing trust assumptions with cryptographic evidence of what ran, where it ran and under what policies. The acquisition brings this capability to a frontier model developer at a time when businesses and regulators want stronger guarantees about how sensitive data is handled when AI agents use it. Anthropic's plans for the technology were not detailed in the report.