Opaque announced the transaction last week, adding that their previous research output and engineering efforts concentrated on confidential computing and recently evolved towards solutions that can help organizations audit the behavior of AI systems and agents.
The company was formed based on a research project at UC Berkeley’s RISELab about ten years earlier. Its co-founders are Ion Stoica, one of the co-founders of Databricks and Anyscale, and Raluca Ada Popa, a Google DeepMind researcher who works on encryption and systems security.
Aaron Fulkerson was hired as the chief executive officer of Opaque in October 2023.
Previously, Opaque worked on solutions that applied confidential computing research to production AI, making sure that the data they process and the models themselves were protected by hardware. However, as the technology matures, Opaque pointed out that there is a need for organizations to ensure that they can audit AI systems.
According to Opaque, the company observed that the trustworthiness of AI is a critical concern for many businesses. Therefore, Opaque’s engineers and scientists took their expertise in cryptographic solutions and expanded the research to make verifiable AI the company’s specialization. They provide cryptographic guarantees that specify what computations happened, where, and under what policy.
Moreover, the startup has made significant contributions to open-source projects that share tools, training, and experience for building trustworthy and secure AI agents and models, such as the Agent Governance Toolkit, TRACE, Confidential MCP, and Weight Custody Manifest.
In early 2026, Opaque raised $24 million in a Series B funding round at a reported valuation of $300 million in funding, and Anthropic was one of their first customers, along with ServiceNow and Accenture.
After the acquisition was announced, Opaque’s website stated that all of its employees would transfer to Anthropic to continue their work, while Opaque itself would shut down.
However, it did not comment on what this means for current customers, and how transactions with organizations will be handled after the acquisition is completed.
The acquisition highlights Opaque’s technology areas and expertise, which fits Anthropic’s strategy to develop more secure and trustworthy AI systems. However, Anthropic and Opaque have not yet released any information about how the technology can be adapted to Anthropic’s solutions and products.
