AI company Anthropic reaches valuation of nearly one trillion dollars

(Patria) - Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced it has raised $65 billion in a new funding round that values the maker of Claude at $965 billion, more than its main rival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, AFP reported.

The latest fundraising round confirms Anthropic's place as one of the most significant players in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and the startup, led by Dario Amodei, has attracted fans for its coding capabilities and cutting-edge models.

The company's growth has come by doubling down on efforts to deliver generative AI to business clients rather than general users, a path initially chosen by its main rival OpenAI.

Founded by former OpenAI employees, including CEO Amodei, Anthropic has a particular focus on AI safety even as it rushes new products to stay in the AI race.

"This funding will help us meet the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more places where work happens," said Krishna Rao, Anthropic's chief financial officer.

Anthropic's valuation of nearly one trillion dollars puts it ahead of OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion in March. Both companies could go public as early as this year.

Ahead of them, Elon Musk's SpaceX, which absorbed his AI company xAI in February, could see its stock begin trading as early as June 12, targeting a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion in what would be the largest initial public offering in history.

The investment round in Anthropic was led by major Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. There is also $15 billion in previously contracted investments from cloud giants, including $5 billion from Amazon.

Semiconductor firms Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix, whose products are key to the technology, also participated as strategic infrastructure partners.

The company said that Claude is now the first frontier AI model available on all three of the world's largest cloud platforms - Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

The funding comes as Anthropic is engaged in a high-profile legal dispute with the Pentagon, after suing the Department of Defense for designating the company as a supply chain risk - a move Anthropic called an unconstitutional retaliation for refusing to grant the military unrestricted access to its AI models.

Mythos is Anthropic's powerful next-generation AI model with unprecedented cybersecurity capabilities.

This has led Anthropic to restrict access to security partners rather than releasing it to the public.