SAN FRANCISCO: Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said Thursday (May 28) it had raised US$65 billion in a new funding round that values the Claude maker at US$965 billion, more than its archrival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
The latest fundraising round confirms Anthropic’s place as one of the most significant players in AI, with the startup led by Dario Amodei having drawn fans for its coding powers and state-of-the-art models.
Anthropic’s rise came by doubling down on delivering generative AI to enterprise clients rather than general users, the path initially chosen by archrival OpenAI.
Founded by former OpenAI employees, including CEO 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 Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer.
Anthropic’s near-trillion-dollar valuation puts it ahead of OpenAI, which was valued at US$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 shares begin trading as early as Jun 12, targeting a valuation of approximately US$1.75 trillion in what would be the largest IPO in history.