Microsoft may soon invest in Anthropic, the AI company that developed the Claude model, said Dylan Patel, founder and principal analyst at Semianalysis. In a post on X, he predicted that the new round of funding would boost the company’s valuation to $59 billion.
“Microsoft wants to have Claude in its pocket to counter OpenAI, which is becoming increasingly aggressive towards Microsoft,” Patel said.
Microsoft could invest in a new round of Anthropic for $59 billion.
Microsoft wants to have Claude in its pocket to counter OpenAI, which is becoming increasingly aggressive towards Microsoft.
A very unpleasant partnership between the two.— Dylan Patel (@dylan522p) December 18, 2024
Anthropic is currently valued at $18.4 billion and raised $4 billion in funding through an Amazon-led round in November. Given recent capital inflows, it seems unlikely that the company will raise new funding in the near future.
I emailed Anthropic but did not receive a response.
That said, Patel previously revealed on his blog that Anthropic has finished training Claude 3.5 Opus and achieved “good performance and good scale.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also previously revealed that the company plans to release its flagship model Claude Opus 3.5 soon.
First, Microsoft is certainly interested in what Anthropic is doing. At the recent GitHub Universe 2024 event, Claude 3.5 Sonnet models were integrated into the coding assistant GitHub Copilot. GitHub also announced that GitHub Copilot will be available for free within Visual Studio Code (VS Code).
If true, this could shake up the AI ecosystem, given Microsoft’s close ties to OpenAI and has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI to date.
If this move goes through, will it further fuel concerns that Microsoft is cannibalizing the AI market? In November, xAI CEO Elon Musk expanded his lawsuit against OpenAI to include Microsoft. Musk alleged anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior in the AI ecosystem.
Even Google has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to end its partnership with Microsoft and OpenAI. The report suggests that companies that buy OpenAI’s technology may have to pay additional costs if they don’t use Microsoft’s servers to run it.
It’s clear that big tech companies don’t like this partnership. Additionally, OpenAI may also remove provisions from its contract with Microsoft that would disable access if OpenAI’s advanced models reach AGI. This provision was included to prevent large companies like Microsoft from gaining access to powerful AI systems and prevent commercial applications from exploiting them.
Additionally, when OpenAI closed its latest $6.6 billion funding round, it reportedly asked investors not to funnel money into competing startups. Anthropic was one of those names, but clearly investors didn’t follow OpenAI’s wishes.
In a 29-minute interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar discussed the terms attached to the investment. “First and foremost, we want to make sure that the ecosystem continues to develop…For this round, we want to make sure that investors are really paying attention to OpenAI. Of course, they go out there and work with the (AI) ecosystem. And in this respect, this round is no different than any other round,” she said.
Additionally, UK-based industry analysis firm CCS Insight predicted that within three years, OpenAI will have such difficulty raising funds that it will need to be sold to Microsoft.
