On Wednesday, cloud AI developer Anthropics confirmed talks to raise $750 million in new investment led by Menlo Ventures, putting the San Francisco company's valuation at around $18 billion after the funding round.
The raise was first reported by The Information, and a source with direct knowledge of the investment confirmed to Decrypt that the $750 million funding target was correct—but clarified that Anthropologie's estimate of $18.4 billion was a pre-round. The source said the previously reported $20-30 billion valuation was only a rumour, and declined to say who might join in the backing.
The news represents just the latest big investment interest in rival OpenAI, which publicly launched its Cloud 2 AI chatbot in July after launching in March.
In September, Amazon invested $4 billion in Anthropogenic, followed by a $2 billion investment from Google, which significantly increased its contribution after it invested $400 million in February.
Menlo Park-based Menlo Ventures announced its first investment in Anthroponic in May.
“The Anthroponic team has been at the forefront of innovation in generative AI since its early days,” said Menlo Ventures investors Andreas Vandries, Derek Xiao and partner Matt Murphy. “Anthroponic was founded as a bet on security research – the team wanted to create a competitive edge in security and build reliable, interpretable and preventable AI systems.”
Responsible AI development has been a big topic of discussion in the year since the launch of OpenAI's GPT-4.
In July, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthroponic created the Frontier Model Forum to ensure the safe and responsible use of development of “frontier AI models.”
Earlier this year, Anthropic rejoined OpenAI, Google and Microsoft after meeting with the Biden administration to pledge to work to develop AI safely. Then, in October, Anthropoc partnered with the Collective Intelligence Project to democratize the development of artificial intelligence.
“AI is going to change the world,” Divya Siddarth, founder of the Collective Intelligence Project, told Decrypt at the time. “But very few people are really defining what that will look like. We want to build processes so that it's no longer true.”
While Google and Amazon continue to pour money into Anthropoc, Microsoft is committed to a long and profitable partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Sam Altman returned as CEO after his unceremonious ouster in November, and as part of his return, Microsoft — which has so far invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI — joined the company's board on a non-voting basis.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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