Anthropic, a San Francisco artificial intelligence startup, is in talks to raise a new round of funding that could value the company at $60 billion, down from $16 billion a year ago, according to two people with knowledge. of the discussions.
Led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, the new round could inject 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 firms like Menlo Ventures and tech giants like amazon, Google, and Salesforce.
The talks come amid a new surge in 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, the creator of online chatbot ChatGPT, raised $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion.
OpenAI kicked off the ai boom in late 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, triggering a funding surge that moved billions into a wide range of startups.
Enthusiasm among investors for ai companies cooled in the summer of 2024, when several high-profile startups essentially became tech giants like Google and amazon. But as companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have continued to improve their technology, interest among investors has regained strength.
(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 those claims.)
Lightspeed Ventures declined to comment on Anthropic's latest funding discussions. Details of the talks were previously reported by <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-startup-anthropic-raising-funding-valuing-it-at-60-billion-19d0605a?mod=djemalertNEWS” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>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 many other members of the company's founding team, they had left OpenAI after disagreements with the company's leadership over how its technologies were funded and released through Microsoft.
In a podcast interview in 2023, Amodei said there was a 10 to 25 percent chance that ai technology could destroy humanity. But in October he took a more optimistic tone and published a 14,000 word essay about the potential benefits of ai technologies.
“I think most people are underestimating how radical the benefits of ai could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how serious the risks could be,” he wrote.
The following month, Anthropic raised $4 billion from amazon, its largest investor, which has invested a total of $8 billion in the startup. Anthropic builds and operates its technologies using computing data centers owned by amazon and Google.
