San Francisco artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is in talks to raise a new round of funding that could value the company at $60 billion, up from about $16 billion less than a year ago, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. the discussions.
Led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, the new round could pump an additional $2 billion into the company, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Since its founding in 2021, Anthropic has raised more than $11.3 billion from venture capital firms like Menlo Ventures and tech giants like Amazon, Google and Salesforce.
The talks come amid a new wave of 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 $35 to $45 billion. In October, OpenAI, maker of the online chatbot ChatGPT, raised $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion.
OpenAI kicked off the AI boom in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, sparking a funding wave that moved billions to a wide range of startups.
Investor enthusiasm for AI companies cooled in the summer of 2024, when a number of high-profile startups were effectively absorbed into tech giants like Google and Amazon. But as companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have continued to improve their technology, investor interest has revived.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied these claims.)
Lightspeed Ventures declined to comment on Anthropic's latest financing discussions. Details of the conversations were previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.
After founding Anthropic, Dario Amodei, the company's CEO, and his sister, Daniela Amodei, Anthropic's president, positioned the company as a startup that would build AI with guardrails.
Like several others on the company's founding team, they had left OpenAI after disagreements with the company's leadership over how the technologies were funded and released through Microsoft.
In a 2023 podcast interview, Mr. Amodei said there was a 10 to 25 percent chance that AI technology could destroy humanity. But in October he struck a more optimistic tone, publishing a 14,000-word essay on the potential benefits of AI technologies.
“I think most people underestimate how radical the benefits of AI can be, just as I think most people underestimate how great the risks can be,” he wrote.
The following month, Anthropic raised $4 billion from Amazon, its largest investor, which has put a total of $8 billion into the startup. Anthropic builds and operates its technologies using computer data centers owned by Amazon and Google.
