Anthropic in talks to raise financing at $60 billion valuation

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

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

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

Anthropic and OpenAI, together with tech giants GoogleAmazon, microsoft and Goalare in a generative AI arms race to ensure they are not left behind in a market expected to exceed $1 trillion in income in a decade. Microsoft, the main investor in OpenAI, and Amazon are Back generative AI startups with strong investments as well as developing our own technologies.

Anthropic’s annualized 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 would 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 seat on the board of directors. Google engaged investing $2 billion in Anthropic last year, after previously confirming it had acquired a 10% stake in the startup along with a large cloud contract between the two companies.

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

Anthropic intensified its development throughout last year and in October saying its AI agents were able to use a computer, as a human would, to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s new computer usability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and Internet browsing in real time.

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

Open AI supposedly plans to introduce a similar feature soon.

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

LOOK: Anthropic collection with a valuation of 60 billion dollars