Artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic is close to securing a $2 billion investment in a deal that would triple the four-year-old company’s value to $60 billion.
Chatbot creator Claude AI is in advanced talks to raise fresh capital from a number of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round comes two months later anthropic secured an additional investments of 4 billion dollars from e-commerce giant Amazon, one of its closest partners.
It is the latest major financing deal for AI company. In October, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in a round valuing the company at $157 billion, while Elon Musk’s xAI, which gained an advantage over rivals since launching in 2023, it has raised $6 billion at a $45 billion valuation in December.
The huge sums are almost unprecedented for venture capital-backed start-ups, which have historically gone public long before their valuations reached tens of billions of dollars. Last year, about half of the $209 billion spent by U.S. venture capitalists went to AI companies, according to data provider PitchBook.
Anthropic and rival start-ups like xAI and OpenAI, as well as established big tech companies including Meta and Google, have been in a fierce race to develop cutting-edge AI models, which require billions of dollars to train and operate. Investors do not expect new companies in this sector to be profitable in the near future. Ultimately, though, they believe the technology could create trillions of dollars in value.
Anthropic, a San Francisco-based company, was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees with a focus on security. Over the past year, it has been competitive with leading AI startups, and in recent months has poached more employees from OpenAI. It was also the first to release certain features such as the ability for its AI to control computers.
Leading AI companies, including Anthropic, have shown progress toward models that show signs of “understanding,” or the ability to consider tasks rather than simply returning information. They are also racing to create AI agents that can perform tasks for users.
Industry executives predict that 2025 will see major breakthroughs in AI technology, including the potential achievement of artificial general intelligence — loosely defined as matching or surpassing human intelligence in a range of disciplines.
“We are now confident that we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a blog published this week. “We believe that in 2025, we could see the first artificial intelligence agents ‘joining the workforce’ and significantly changing the performance of companies,” he added.
Details of Anthropica’s fundraising were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic declined to comment. Lightspeed Venture Partners did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
