Anthropic acquires confidential-computing startup Opaque Systems

AI Weekly reports that Anthropic acquired Opaque Systems and describes the arrangement as a license-and-hire.[1] The report says Opaque CEO Aaron Fulkerson, CTO Rishabh Poddar and some engineers are joining Anthropic, but not all Opaque employees.[1] OPAQUE’s own announcement says its team is joining Anthropic to carry its work forward, and that Opaque Systems is winding down its operations.[2][3] The financial terms were not disclosed in AI Weekly’s account, so the available evidence does not establish a purchase price or other deal economics.[1]

OPAQUE says its technology lets organizations run AI workloads on sensitive data with hardware-enforced protections.[2] It describes its verifiable-AI work as aiming to provide cryptographic evidence of what ran, where it ran and under what policies.[2] OPAQUE says organizations needed a way to independently verify how AI systems and agents behaved.[2] The company also says its work included the Agent Governance Toolkit, TRACE, Confidential MCP and Weight Custody Manifest.[2] These are descriptions from OPAQUE; the evidence does not provide an independent assessment of the technology’s performance or adoption.

OPAQUE says its open-source work continues at AgenTrust.[3] It specifically says the Weight Custody Manifest, Agent Manifest, Confidential MCP, Confidential A2A and TRACE remain open and available under their existing licenses.[3] That gives teams considering these projects a stated path to access them even as Opaque Systems winds down its operations.[3] The announcement does not specify how future maintenance or support will work, so organizations should check the projects’ current documentation and licensing before relying on them. The latter is a practical next step, not a commitment made in OPAQUE’s announcement.

OPAQUE says the company began as a UC Berkeley RISELab research project ten years ago and brought confidential computing from research into production AI environments.[2] Race Capital also lists ServiceNow, Accenture and Anthropic among Opaque’s customers.[4] Separately, AI Weekly reports that Opaque raised a $24 million Series B at a $300 million valuation; those figures are not the disclosed terms of the Anthropic deal.[1]