OPAQUE’s Next Chapter: Advancing Trusted AI at Anthropic
OPAQUE enters its next chapter as its team joins Anthropic, building on years of pioneering work in confidential computing and verifiable AI.
From Berkeley research to enterprise AI, OPAQUE has helped make sensitive data usable while keeping it protected. Now, its team is joining Anthropic to carry that work forward.
When Walden Catalyst led OPAQUE’s $22 million Series A in 2022, the company was tackling a difficult challenge: enabling organizations to collaborate on analytics and AI without exposing their sensitive data. Its approach to confidential computing offered a path from pioneering research to practical enterprise applications.
Today, that journey enters a new chapter. OPAQUE has announced that its team is joining Anthropic.
From protecting data to making trust verifiable
OPAQUE’s roots lie in UC Berkeley’s RISELab, where its researchers explored how organizations could process sensitive information while preserving its privacy, even during computation. The team brought that work into production, using hardware-enforced protections to help organizations run AI on data they could otherwise struggle to use securely.
As AI systems became more capable, OPAQUE expanded its focus. Protecting data and models remained essential, but organizations also needed evidence that AI systems were operating within defined boundaries. OPAQUE’s work in verifiable AI addressed that need through cryptographic evidence of how and where workloads ran, and which policies governed them.
For us, that progression reflects a central opportunity in AI infrastructure: building the foundations that allow powerful technology to be used with confidence. As AI reaches deeper into enterprise workflows, security and governance become integral to what businesses can deploy.
Recognizing the team behind the work
We are proud to have supported OPAQUE on its journey from confidential computing pioneer to its work in verifiable AI. This milestone is an opportunity to recognize the researchers, engineers and broader team who translated ambitious ideas into working technology.
Congratulations to Aaron Fulkerson, the founding team and everyone at OPAQUE. We look forward to seeing their work continue at Anthropic.
Read OPAQUE’s announcement · Read our original investment announcement