Romanian co-founded tech company Opaque acquired by Anthropic

Opaque, a company co-founded by Romanian Raluca Ada Popa, announced that it had been acquired by Anthropic, the developer of Claude, after the two companies reached an agreement.

Opaque essentially helps organizations to run AI workloads on sensitive data with hardware-enforced protections.

“As AI evolved, so did the problem we set out to solve. Protecting data and models was no longer enough. Organizations also needed a way to independently verify how AI systems and agents behaved. This led us to expand our work from confidential AI to verifiable AI: replacing assumptions of trust with cryptographic evidence of what ran, where it ran, and under which policies,” the company explained in a press release.

The team at Opaque developed technology and contributed to open-source projects aimed at security, governance, and verifiability in the AI sector.

“We also saw this work expanding beyond OPAQUE. Through AgenTrust and projects such as Agent Governance Toolkit, TRACE, Confidential MCP, and Weight Custody Manifest, we have collaborated with a broader community to develop open approaches to some of the most difficult trust and security challenges arising around AI agents and models,” the company further explained.

Popa is the co-founder and president of Opaque Systems, and she is also an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Anthropic is acquiring Opaque, the company I co-founded with my students at Berkeley and a colleague,” Raluca Ada Popa announced on her Facebook page.