Anthropic has bought Opaque Systems, a startup focused on confidential computing. The move pulls Opaque’s confidential computing and cryptographic verification tech inside Anthropic, with enterprise customers clearly in mind.
The companies didn’t share terms. Opaque says the deal is mostly an acquihire: its team, including CEO Aaron Fulkerson and CTO Rishabh Poddar, is heading to Anthropic. Anthropic will license technology built around privacy, compliance, and data residency, while Opaque shuts down its own operations.
Opaque came out of UC Berkeley’s RISELab about a decade ago, with researchers including Ion Stoica and Raluca Ada Popa involved from the start. The company built tools that let customers work with sensitive or encrypted data inside hardware-protected environments, then verify cryptographically what actually ran, where it ran, and which rules governed it. That’s the kind of setup that makes sense for finance, healthcare, and government buyers that need compliance they can audit.
If you follow AI security, this one matters. It looks like a real vote of confidence in confidential computing, and it also fits into a wider security push.
Opaque says it had already moved beyond the research stage and into production deployments. This year it raised a $24 million Series B at a $300 million valuation, said Anthropic, ServiceNow, and Accenture were among its customers, and contributed to Agent Governance Toolkit, TRACE, Confidential MCP, and Weight Custody Manifest. What happens next is a lot murkier: support, migration paths, access to tooling, the future of those projects, and the bigger question of whether Anthropic should own verification tools at all.
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Author: Manuel Bosque
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