Artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic is close to securing a $2bn investment in a deal that would triple the four-year-old company’s valuation to $60bn.
The maker of the Claude AI chatbot is in advanced talks about raising the fresh capital from a number of top Silicon Valley investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round comes two months after Anthropic secured an additional $4bn investment from ecommerce giant Amazon, one of its closest partners.
It is the latest massive funding deal for an AI company. In October, OpenAI raised $6.6bn in a round valuing the company at $157bn, while Elon Musk’s xAI, which has gained ground on rivals since launching in 2023, raised $6bn at a $45bn valuation in December.
The vast 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, roughly half of the $209bn spent by US venture capitalists went to AI companies, according to data provider PitchBook.
Anthropic and rival start-ups such as 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 run. Investors are not anticipating start-ups in the sector will 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 safety. It has been competitive with leading AI start-ups over the past year, and poached multiple staff from OpenAI in recent months. It was also first to release certain features such as the ability for its AI to control computers.
Leading AI companies, including Anthropic, have demonstrated progress towards models that show signs of “reasoning”, or being able to consider tasks rather than simply regurgitating information. They are also racing to create AI agents that can complete tasks for users.
Executives in the sector have forecast 2025 will see more significant breakthroughs in AI technology, including potentially achieving artificial general intelligence — loosely defined as matching or surpassing human intelligence across a set of disciplines.
“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,” OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman wrote in a blog published this week. “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies,” he added.
Details of Anthropic’s fundraise were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic declined to comment. Lightspeed Venture Partners did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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