Anthropic Targets $40 Billion Valuation in New Funding Round

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is seeking a new round of financing with a valuation as high as $40 billion. Currently, the negotiations are only in the early stages, and it is unclear whether investors will agree to accept such a high valuation.

Additionally, Anthropic also plans to showcase its business achievements to investors at Morgan Stanley's private tech conference next month. It is worth noting that although startups usually do not hire investment banks to solicit investments, they will raise funds through complex financing methods.

Anthropic has previously raised funds from corporate investors, not limited to venture capital firms.

Just about two weeks before the news of Anthropic's new financing, there were reports that the company's main competitor, OpenAI, is seeking a $6.5 billion financing round, with the latest valuation reaching $150 billion.

Anthropic is a company founded in 2021 by former executives of OpenAI, focusing on creating explainable, safe, and controllable artificial intelligence systems. The company's flagship AI model, Claude, operates based on Constitutional AI, which is an artificial intelligence model that uses predefined principles to guide its output, avoiding some erroneous or discriminatory output responses.

Accordingly, Anthropic's largest investor is Amazon, which has invested in the company twice, participating in two financing rounds of $1.25 billion in September 2023 and $2.75 billion in March this year. Considering the increasingly close cooperation between the two companies, any new round of financing for Anthropic may again involve Amazon.

The cooperation between the two companies includes providing Anthropic's large language model on Amazon's cloud hosting service, Bedrock. A report in August also indicated that Anthropic's large model will power a new version of Amazon's Alexa smart assistant.

In addition, other investors of Anthropic include Google, Microsoft, Salesforce's venture capital department, Salesforce Ventures, and Zoom Video Communications.

Currently, in Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence track, Microsoft and Apple have invested in and cooperated with OpenAI to provide generative artificial intelligence services; Google is building its own internal artificial intelligence models; and Amazon is cooperating with Anthropic.