Anthropic is in talks to raise $60 billion in funding

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI research executives, is in talks to raise up to $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 spoke on condition of anonymity because the details are confidential. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the funding news.

Anthropic, which has received significant support Amazonis the creator of the AI ​​chatbot Claude. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has grown in popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots into sales, marketing and customer service functions.

Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as tech giants Googleamazon, Microsoft and Metaare in a generative AI arms race to ensure they keep up in the market according to forecasts, will exceed 1 trillion dollars in income for ten years. Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, and Amazon supporting generative AI startups with significant investment as well as the development of own technologies.

Anthropic’s annual revenue is about $875 million and comes mostly from enterprise sales, 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, CNBC Anthropic confirmed at the time, and has no seat on the board. Google committed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic last year after previously confirming it had taken a 10% stake in the startup along with a major cloud contract between the two companies.

In the same month as Amazon’s latest investment, the company’s cloud division became Anthropic’s “primary cloud and learning partner.” Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.

Anthropic has been ramping up development over the past year and into October said its AI agents could use a computer like a human to perform complex tasks. The new Anthropic Computer Use capability allows you to interpret what’s on your computer screen, select buttons, type text, navigate websites, and perform tasks using any software and web browsing in real time.

“The tool can ‘use computers basically the same way we do,'” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC at the time. He said it can perform tasks with “dozens or even hundreds of steps.”

OpenAI reportedly plans will introduce a similar feature soon.

In September, Anthropic rolled out by Claude Enterprisethe biggest new product since the chatbot’s debut, aimed at businesses looking to integrate their AI. Anthropic earlier this year debuted its more powerful AI model, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

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