San Francisco artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is in talks for a new round of funding that could value it at $60 billion, up from about $16 billion less than a year ago, according to people familiar with the discussions. Two people revealed this.
The new round, led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, could inject an additional $2 billion into the company, the people said, asking not to be identified. Since its founding in 2021, Anthropic has raised more than $11.3 billion from venture firms like Menlo Park Ventures and major technology companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.
The talks come amid a flurry of new funding for the industry’s most prominent AI startups. Last month, Elon Musk’s xAI raised $6 billion in a deal that valued the company at between $35 billion and $45 billion. In October, OpenAI, maker of the online chatbot ChatGPT, raised $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion.
OpenAI sparked an AI boom in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, sparking a surge in funding and billions of dollars flowing into a wide range of startups.
Investor enthusiasm for AI companies had cooled by the summer of 2024, as several well-known startups essentially merged into tech giants like Google and Amazon. But as companies like OpenAI and Anthropic continue to improve their technology, investor interest is regaining momentum.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied these claims.)
Lightspeed Ventures declined to comment on Anthropic’s recent funding discussions. Details of the meeting were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
After Anthropic was founded, the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, and his sister, Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president, positioned the company as a startup building AI with guardrails.
Like several other members of the company’s founding team, they had left OpenAI after disagreements with company executives over how the technology would be funded and released through Microsoft.
In a 2023 podcast interview, Amodei said there was a 10-25% chance that AI technology would wipe out humanity. But in October, he struck a more optimistic tone, publishing a 14,000-word essay on the potential benefits of AI technology.
“I think most people underestimate how radical the benefits of AI can be, just as I think most people underestimate how serious the risks can be. ” he wrote.
The following month, Anthropic raised $4 billion from Amazon, its largest investor, bringing the company’s total investment to the startup to $8 billion. Anthropic uses computer data centers owned by Amazon and Google to build and operate its technology.
