Why is the AI company called Anthropic?
The word is older than the company by half a century. Here is where it actually comes from.
1 min read
If you arrived here after searching for the AI lab: welcome. This site is about the physics the company borrowed its name from.
Anthropic comes from the Greek anthropos, meaning human. The anthropic principle was named in 1973 by the physicist Brandon Carter, at a conference marking the 500th birthday of Copernicus — precisely to push back against a naive reading of the Copernican idea that our position is in no way special.
Carter's point was subtle. We shouldn't assume we are central, but neither can we ignore that our existence as observers selects what we are able to observe. The word stuck, and for fifty years it belonged to cosmology.
The company Anthropic, founded in 2021, took the name in the spirit of centering humanity and human values in the development of AI. It is a fitting choice — but the concept it points back to is this one: the strange, deep question of why the universe is the kind of place that can contain minds asking about it.
The AI lab named itself after our topic — not the other way around.