Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is in talks with investors to raise $30 billion to $50 billion in new funding that would value it at up to $950 billion, people familiar with the discussions said.
The talks could fall apart, the people said, but if the financing is completed, Anthropic’s valuation would jump to 2.5 times its $380 billion valuation just three months ago. This would also raise Anthropic’s value above that of its prized rival OpenAI 852 billion dollars in the collection in March.
An Anthropic spokesman declined to comment. Bloomberg previously reported at the financing meeting.
Investors have poured money into artificial intelligence companies in Silicon Valley, where startups that didn’t exist a year ago continue to raise eye-watering sums from venture capitalists eager to cash in on the craze. In the first three months of the year, AI companies broke fundraising records with a haul of $297 billion, driven by huge funding rounds for the biggest AI firms that made four of the five biggest deals on record.
Even in a crowded AI environment, Anthropic stands out. The San Francisco company has made significant progress in selling AI products such as Claude Code, a tool that allows robots to write software autonomously, to businesses. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently said that the company has jumped to $30 billion, the amount of money it expects to generate annually, and could grow 80 times this year.
“I hope the 80x growth doesn’t continue because that’s just crazy and too hard to handle,” Mr Amodei said at the Anthropic developer conference this month. “I’m hoping for some more normal numbers.”
Last month, Anthropic released a powerful new artificial intelligence model, Mythos, that is so powerful at identifying security vulnerabilities in software that it could create a “cybersecurity showdown,” the company said. Antropic refused to make the model public and only provided access to a few organizations. Mythos has since set off a global alarm as governments and others call for the model to be tested.
Mythos complicated Anthropic’s relationship with the US government. The company recently ran afoul of the Department of Defense, which claimed Anthropic was trying to dictate how to use AI in warfighting and called the startup a security risk. Antropic then sued the government.
But since the release of Mythos, the model’s power has prompted some American officials to try to mend the rift. Mr. Amodei met with White House officials last month for discussions that both sides described as “productive.”
Anthropic still faces challenges. The company is locked in competition with OpenAI, Google and xAI for consumer and enterprise products. To keep up with the pace of growth, Anthropic also continues to make deals with tech giants for new funding and computing power for AI development. Last month, Google committed to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, while Amazon agreed to invest up to $25 billion.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. Both companies have denied the claims.)
