Anthropic's new acqui-hire deal.

Its licensing Opaque Systems’ technology for running AI on confidential data and hiring some of its engineers, including CEO Aaron Fulkerson and CTO Rishabh Poddar.

Standard encryption guards data on disk and across networks, but a model can only read it once it’s decrypted in memory.
Opaque’s platform closes that gap by running AI jobs inside hardware-sealed environments that produce cryptographic evidence of what happened during each run.
That evidence lets a bank or hospital verify which code touched its records, on which machine and under which rules.

That technology began as a UC Berkeley RISELab project about 10 years ago and carried Opaque to a $300M valuation after a $24M Series B in February, with $55.5M raised in total.

Anthropic was already an Opaque customer and had published a confidential inference design with Pattern Labs in June 2025, while noting that some AI chips still lack full confidential computing support.

Neither company has said whether Opaque’s platform will keep serving ServiceNow, Accenture and its other customers under the license-and-hire structure.