Why Claude? The AI I chose to use and teach

People ask me this all the time. I will be mid-workshop, or halfway through a coffee, and someone leans in and says: so, Suzie, why Claude? Out of every AI tool out there, why is that the one you use every day and the one you teach? It is a fair question, and the honest answer has almost nothing to do with features. It is about who is building the thing.

So here is the honest version. I chose Claude because of the people behind it. It is made by a company called Anthropic, run by Dario and Daniela Amodei, a brother and sister team who started the company because they could see how powerful AI was going to be. They felt someone had to build it with humanity in mind first, not as an afterthought once the profits had been counted. Humans first, profit second. That is not the move-fast-and-break-things crowd, and it is not the big-tech commercial side. It is closer to where I land than most of the industry.

Who is building it matters

When you pick an AI, you are not just picking a clever tool. You are picking the company behind it, and what that company has decided to care about. A brother and sister who set out to build this carefully, with people at the front of their minds, is a very different starting point from a business racing to ship the next thing before anyone else does. For me, that is the whole ballgame. When you are handing a tool this much of your working life, who is holding the wheel counts for more than a flashy feature you will use twice.

I am not choosing an AI on features alone. I am choosing the people who have to answer to more than a share price.

The paperwork that backs up the gut call

Now, a good founding story is one thing. What made me trust it is that the same idea is written into the company's legal structure, not just its marketing. Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation, or PBC. A normal company is legally bound to put shareholder returns first. A PBC is legally bound to balance the benefit to people against profit, so doing right by the wider world is part of the job description, not a nice-to-have they can quietly drop when it gets expensive.

It goes a step further with something called a Long-Term Benefit Trust, a group set up to help keep the company steered towards its mission over the long haul rather than the next quarter. That mission is framed around AI that benefits humanity and stays safe. So the "humans first" part is not just a warm feeling I get from a founding story. A fair chunk of it is built into how the company is set up to operate.

Human first, AI assisted

My whole approach comes down to a line I say often: human first, AI assisted. I want a tool that speeds up the fiddly work so you have more room for the human parts, the thinking, the storytelling, the care. What I do not want is a tool that fakes the story, invents things that never happened, or quietly flattens a person's voice into bland mush. The way an AI is built, and the values of the people building it, shape whether it helps you sound more like you or less. Claude, for how I work and how my clients work, lands on the right side of that.

I am not here to bag the others

To be clear, this is not me telling you every other tool is rubbish. There are some brilliant AI tools out there, and plenty of them do great work. This is not a fight, it is a fit. For the honest, human storytelling my clients and I care about, Claude is the values match, and that is why it is the one I have built my teaching around. You might weigh things differently, and that is completely fine. The part that matters is that you choose on purpose, values and all, rather than just grabbing whatever is loudest in the room.