Anthropic in talks to raise funding at $60 billion valuation

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

The funding round is being 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 first to report on the funding news.

Anthropic, which has been backed heavily by Amazon, is the creator of the AI chatbot Claude. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer service functions.

Anthropic and OpenAI, along with tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, are in a generative AI arms race to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Microsoft, OpenAI’s principal investor, and Amazon are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as developing their own technologies.

Anthropic’s annualized revenue is about $875 million and comes chiefly 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 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 large 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 moving forward.

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

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

OpenAI reportedly plans to introduce a similar feature soon.

In September, Anthropic rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since its chatbot’s debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate its AI. Earlier in the year, Anthropic debuted its more powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

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