SAN FRANCISCO – Anthropic is now the most valuable artificial intelligence start-up in the world, surpassing its arch-rival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.On May 28, Anthropic said it has raised US$65 billion (S$82.9 billion) in its latest financing round, valuing the Claude maker at US$965 billion, ahead of OpenAI, which was last valued at US$852 billion in March.Both companies could go public as early as 2026.OpenAI kicked off the AI boom with its release of the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022. It took the generative AI pioneer roughly a decade to achieve its latest valuation. Anthropic surpassed that in half the time, The New York Times noted.Anthropic’s rise came by doubling down on delivering generative AI to enterprise clients rather than general users, the path initially chosen by OpenAI.Founded by former OpenAI employees, including chief executive officer Dario Amodei, Anthropic has a special focus on AI safety even as it rushes out new products in order to remain in the AI race.“This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens,” said Mr Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer.Ahead of them, billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which absorbed his AI company xAI in February, could see shares begin trading as early as June 12, targeting a valuation of approximately US$1.75 trillion in what would be the largest initial public offering in history.Anthropic’s latest financing round was led by major Silicon Valley venture capitalists Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.It also included US$15 billion in previously committed investments from cloud giants, including US$5 billion from Amazon.Semiconductor firms Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix – whose products are crucial to the technology – also participated as strategic infrastructure partners.The company said Claude is now the first frontier AI model available across all three of the world’s largest cloud platforms – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.The funding comes as Anthropic navigates a high-profile legal dispute with the Pentagon, having sued the Defence Department after it designated the company a supply chain risk – a move Anthropic called unconstitutional retaliation for its refusal to grant the military unfettered access to its AI models.On May 28, Anthropic said it is launching an upgraded Claude Opus 4.8 model even as it works to release its powerful, market-moving Mythos model to all customers in the coming weeks.Mythos is the AI lab’s large language model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that have raised concerns among executives and world leaders about its impact.As a part of Project Glasswing, major tech firms such as Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are permitted to use Mythos for cybersecurity purposes.The company said Opus 4.8 will be available for the same price as its predecessor and shows improvements across benchmarks, particularly in honesty.Early testers report that the model is more likely to flag uncertainties around its work and less likely to make unsupported claims, Anthropic added.“A general problem with AI models is that they sometimes jump to conclusions, confidently claiming to have made progress in their work despite the evidence being thin,” the Claude maker said. AFP, REUTERS