Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Thursday it had raised $65 billion (€55.8bn) in private funding, pushing its valuation to $965bn (€829bn). This made the five-year-old maker of the Claude chatbot one of the world's most valuable start-ups as it moves towards a likely Wall Street debut.
The announcement vaults Anthropic ahead of its chief rival, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, both in market value and in reported revenue. Anthropic said it's now making annualised revenue of $47bn (€40.4bn) from selling its technology to people and organisations using Claude to write code and do other work and personal tasks on their behalf.
Anthropic was formed in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, and now both AI firms, along with Elon Musk's rocket and AI company SpaceX, are expected to become publicly traded. All three are also still losing more money than they make, fuelling concerns of an AI bubble.
San Francisco-based Anthropic said the new round of funding was led by investment firms Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks Capital and Sequoia Capital.
“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,” Anthropic chief financial officer Krishna Rao said in a statement.
