Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
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CNBC has confirmed that Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI research executives, is in late-stage talks to raise as much as $2 billion at a valuation of $60 billion.
The financing 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. Wall Street Journal was the first to report on news in the field of financing.
Anthropic, which has been heavily supported by Amazonis the creator of the AI chatbot Claude. Like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Claude's popularity skyrocketed as companies began using generative AI chatbots in sales, marketing and customer service functions.
Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as tech giants GoogleAmazon, Microsoft AND Metathey are taking part in the arms race of generative artificial intelligence so as not to be left behind in the market it is expected to exceed $1 trillion revenues within a decade. Microsoft, OpenAI's main investor, and Amazon supporting generative AI startups with large investments as well as developing our own technologies.
According to the person, Anthropic's annual revenue is about $875 million and comes primarily from business sales. Lightspeed, an existing investor in Anthropic, declined to comment on the current round.
in November Amazon announced that it will 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 has no seat on the board. Google involved invested $2 billion in Anthropic last year, after previously confirming it had taken a 10% stake in the startup along with a large cloud contract between the two companies.
In the same month as Amazon's latest 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 artificial intelligence models.
Anthropic accelerated its growth throughout last year and into October he said its AI agents were able to use a computer like a human to perform complex tasks. Anthropic says the new Computer Use feature allows its technology to interpret computer screen content, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and perform tasks using any software, and browse the Internet in real time.
The tool can “use computers basically the same way we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said he could perform tasks consisting of “dozens or even hundreds of steps.”
OpenAI apparently plans introduce a similar feature soon.
Anthropic in September released Claude Enterpriseits biggest novelty since the chatbot's debut, intended for companies wanting to integrate artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, Anthropic debuted its more powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
TO WATCH: : $60 billion anthropic collection
