Tech giant Google is reportedly investing more than $1 billion in Anthropic, an AI startup that developed the Claude language model.
This new investment is in addition to a nearly $2 billion funding round reported earlier this month led by Lightspeed Venture Partners that valued the company at about $60 billion.
In 2023, Google invested $300 million in Anthropic, acquiring a 10% stake in the company. Last November, Amazon led Anthropic’s $4 billion fundraising effort, bringing the company’s total funding to $8 billion.
Big tech companies are more interested in Anthropic than ever, thanks to the strong Claude model family that competes with OpenAI’s offerings. Recently, OpenAI backer Microsoft integrated Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model into its coding assistant GitHub Copilot. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he has never been more confident in the proximity of powerful AI systems.
“What I’ve seen over the past few months, inside and outside of Anthropic, has led me to believe that within two to three years, human-level systems that can surpass humans at every task are on track. ” said Amodei.
He also announced plans to build “virtual collaborators,” comprehensive AI agents that can autonomously handle multiple everyday tasks.
That said, Anthropic also plans to release a powerful Claude 3.5 Opus model, according to Amodei. “I won’t give the exact date, but as far as we know there are still plans for a Claude 3.5 Opus,” Amodei said on a podcast episode with Lex Fridman.
According to the report, Anthropic has finished training Claude 3.5 Opus and it “showed good performance with proper scaling.”
In October 2024, Anthropic’s main competitor, OpenAI, raised $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion.
In December, the company launched its powerful o3 family of models, which outperformed all other models in benchmarks. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also revealed that the o3 mini model will be released in the coming weeks after external testing by safety researchers.
