Anthropic’s done it again. On Tuesday, Opaque Systems announced a new agreement with Anthropic that “carries Opaque’s work forward.” 

Vague wording aside, the agreement marks another acquihire for Anthropic, with the AI juggernaut licensing Opaque’s technology and bringing on board some (but not all) of its employees, including Opaque CEO Aaron Fulkerson and CTO Rishabh Poddar, reports The Information.

The agreement gives Anthropic access to expertise in confidential AI, the “real-world technology” and category Opaque claims it helped define after starting as a research project at UC Berkeley’s RISELab 10 years ago with the goal to “enabl[e] organizations to use their most sensitive data while keeping it private, even while it’s being used.”

For now, both Anthropic and Opaque are pretty mum on the details of the deal, leaving one obvious question on everyone’s mind:

What will happen to Opaque’s open-source ecosystem? And what does that mean for the developers relying on them?

On LinkedIn, where he shared news of the agreement, Fulkerson reflected on Opaque’s work defining the category of confidential AI, what he described as “verifiability for the AI stack.” 

When asked for more information on the term, Arjun Jaggi, associate director of R&D innovation at Cognizant, describes confidential computing in AI to The New Stack as “running workloads on sensitive data while the data stays protected by the hardware itself, even while it’s being used.”

Whether or not it truly defined the category, the startup’s sure been making its mark. Earlier this year, it closed a $24 million Series B with a $300 million valuation.

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