Anthropic in talks to raise funding at a $60 billion valuation

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI research executives, is in late-stage talks to raise up to $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation, CNBC has confirmed.

The funding round is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details are confidential. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on the funding news.

Anthropic, which has been supported a lot by Amazonis the creator of the AI ​​chatbot Claude. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as companies incorporate generative AI chatbots into sales, marketing and customer service functions.

Anthropic and OpenAI, together with the giants of technology Googleamazon, Microsoft and Metathey are in a generative AI arms race to make sure they don’t fail in a market expected to exceed $1 trillion in revenue over a decade. Microsoft, the main investor of OpenAI, and Amazon are support generative AI startups with strong investments in addition to developing its own technology.

Anthropic’s annual revenue is about $875 million and comes primarily from enterprise sales, the person said. Lightspeed, an existing investor in Anthropic, declined to comment on the current round.

In November, Amazon announced that it will invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, bringing its total investment to $8 billion. Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic confirmed to CNBC at the time, and does not have a board seat. Google committed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic last year, after previously confirming it had taken a 10% stake in the startup alongside a major cloud contract between the two companies.

The same month as Amazon’s most recent investment, the company’s cloud division became Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner.” Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models going forward.

Anthropic ramped up development throughout the past year and into October he said its AI agents were able to use a computer like a human to complete complex tasks. Anthropic said its new Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on the computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites, and perform tasks through any software and real time internet browsing.

The tool can “use computers practically the same way we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said that he can do the tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps”.

OpenAI it is said that the plans to introduce a similar feature soon.

In September, Anthropic launched Claude Enterprisetheir biggest new product since their chatbot debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate their AI. At the beginning of the year, Anthropic debuted its most powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

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