San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic is in talks to raise a new round of funding that could value the company at $60 billion, down from about $16 billion a year ago, according to two people aware of the discussions.
Led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, the new round could inject another $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 capital firms like Menlo Ventures and tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.
The talks come amid a new wave of funding for the industry’s top 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 maker 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 release of ChatGPT, triggering a wave of funding 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 were essentially transformed into tech giants like Google and Amazon. But as companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have continued to improve their technology, interest among investors has revived.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those allegations.)
Lightspeed Ventures declined to comment on Anthropic’s latest funding discussions. Details of the talks were previously reported by 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 start-up that would develop artificial intelligence 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 being funded and released through Microsoft.
In a podcast interview in 2023, Amodei said there was a 10 to 25 percent chance that artificial intelligence technology could destroy humanity. But in October he struck a more optimistic tone, publishing a 14,000-word essay on the potential benefits of artificial intelligence technologies.
“I think most people are underestimating how radical the benefit 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 invested a total of $8 billion in the start-up. Anthropic builds and operates its technologies using data centers owned by Amazon and Google.