Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
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Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI research executives, is in late-stage talks to raise as much as $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation, CNBC has confirmed.
The funding round is being led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details are confidential. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the funding news.
Anthropic, which has a lot of support Amazonthe creator of the AI chatbot is Claude. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as companies incorporate generative AI chatbots into sales, marketing and customer service functions.
Anthropic and OpenAI, along with the tech giants GoogleAmazon, Microsoft and Targetare in a generative AI arms race to ensure they are not left behind in the market it is projected to exceed $1 trillion of income within a decade. Microsoft, the main investor of OpenAI, and Amazon are supporting generative AI startups with large investments as well as the development of own technologies.
Anthropic’s annual revenue is about $875 million and comes mostly from the sale of businesses, the person said. Lightspeed, an existing investor in Anthropic, declined to comment on the current round.
In November Amazon announced that it will invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, bringing its total investment to $8 billion. Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic confirmed to CNBC at the time, and has no board seat. Google committed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic last year, after previously confirming that it had taken a 10% stake in the startup in addition to a major cloud deal between the two companies.
In the same month as Amazon’s latest investment, the company’s cloud division became Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner.” Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models going forward.
Anthropic accelerated development over the past year and in October he said its AI agents could use a computer, as humans would, to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s new computing capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate web pages and perform tasks through any software and browse the Internet in real time.
The tool can “use computers basically the same way we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientific officer, said in an interview with CNBC at the time. He said it can perform tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
OpenAI allegedly plans to to introduce a similar feature soon.
In September, Anthropic hatched by Claude Enterpriseits biggest new product since the debut of its chatbot, designed for businesses looking to integrate their AI. Earlier this year, Anthropic debuted its more powerful AI model, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
