Anthropic has acquired Opaque Systems, which announced the deal the week before, saying its team is joining Anthropic to carry its work forward while it winds down operations. Financial terms were not disclosed, and Opaque has not said what the wind-down means for its existing customers.
Opaque built technology that lets AI systems use sensitive data while the underlying hardware keeps that data protected. It began about a decade ago as a university research project, was commercialised as confidential computing for production AI, and expanded into what it calls verifiable AI, which it describes as replacing trust assumptions with cryptographic evidence of what ran, where and under what policies. It also contributed to open projects on AI agent and model trust, including an agent governance toolkit and a confidential version of the Model Context Protocol.
Its founders included Ion Stoica, a co-founder of Databricks and Anyscale, and Raluca Ada Popa, a security researcher now at Google DeepMind. Aaron Fulkerson became chief executive in October 2023. This year the company raised a $24 million Series B at a $300 million valuation. Opaque listed Anthropic among its customers, alongside ServiceNow and Accenture.
Opaque said protecting data and models was no longer enough and that organisations also needed to verify independently how AI systems and agents behave.
