Technology History | Precita Park — The Company That Brought Its Own Chairs

The circles in the photograph were painted on this lawn in June 2020, six feet across, so that strangers could sit apart.

In its earliest days Anthropic held weekly lunches on this grass, and the people who came carried folding chairs from home.

The company was incorporated in January 2021 as a Delaware public benefit corporation, in the middle of the pandemic's second wave, and its founding group met entirely over Zoom.

Fifteen to twenty employees came to the Precita Park lunches, by Alex Kantrowitz's reported account of Dario Amodei; the San Francisco Chronicle names the same park in its account of the company's origins.

There was no office to meet in.

The founders had left OpenAI over a disagreement about how far to push scaling and how much alignment work had to run alongside it.

Anthropic publicly identifies seven co-founders — Dario Amodei, who had been OpenAI's vice president of research, his sister Daniela, who had run safety and policy there, and Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Chris Olah.

Some accounts make it eight by adding Ben Mann, which is why the number moves around between sources.

The public benefit structure was the part that had to be chosen rather than inherited, since it obliges directors to weigh a stated public purpose against shareholder returns.

In May 2021 the company announced a $124 million Series A led by the Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn.

By early 2026 Daniela Amodei was describing more than 1,300 employees in the Bay Area alone.

Precita Park is public and free, a long open lawn under old trees with parked cars along both edges and dogs off the leash most afternoons.

The distancing circles have worn away.

Anthropic's offices are now about five kilometres north on Howard Street, and nobody carries a chair to them.

Photo: LuisVilla, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons — Precita Park, 6 June 2020.

Sources: Alex Kantrowitz on Dario Amodei; San Francisco Chronicle; Anthropic's May 2021 funding announcement; DivcoWest and Blackstone Real Estate press release, February 2026.