Anthropic, the high-flying artificial intelligence start-up that makes the Claude chatbot, plans to raise $10 billion in funding that would value it at roughly $350 billion, nearly doubling its valuation from just four months ago, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Talks over the financing, which would be led by Coatue Management as well as GIC, which is Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and other shareholders, come amid speculation that Anthropic is eyeing an initial public offering in the next 12 to 18 months as rivals like OpenAI race to add more capital to their coffers. The financing discussions are ongoing, and the plans could change.
Anthropic, which is based in San Francisco, declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported on the funding talks.
The discussions are another sign of the investment frenzy around A.I., which has driven concerns about a bubble and raised questions about the viability of A.I. businesses. Developing A.I. products such as chatbots is costly, requiring enormous amounts of capital, energy and data for the computing resources to train the programs.
In October, OpenAI closed a deal that values the company at $500 billion. On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s xAI said it had raised $20 billion in a funding round that most likely put its value at above $230 billion.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei. They had left OpenAI after disagreements over how its technologies were being funded and released through Microsoft. The Amodeis created Anthropic to build A.I. with safety guardrails. They also structured the company as a public benefit corporation, which is aimed at creating public and social good.
In 2024, Anthropic raised $8 billion from Amazon, its largest investor. Google has invested around $3 billion and controls around 14 percent of the company, according to court documents obtained by The Times. In total, Anthropic has raised at least $40 billion in financing, according to data compiled by PitchBook, which tracks start-ups.
Anthropic closed its previous funding round in September, in a deal that valued it at $183 billion. At the end of the year, Microsoft and Nvidia also said they would invest roughly $15 billion in Anthropic.
As it works to improve its A.I. technologies and deliver them to businesses and consumers, Anthropic is spending tens of billions on data center hardware that powers artificial intelligence.
Late last year, the company said it planned to spend $50 billion on data centers in Texas and New York alongside a cloud company, Fluidstack. But Anthropic did not specify how it planned to fund the project.
The company is also spending billions to buy computing power from Google and Amazon. Anthropic will be the primary user of a jaw-droppingly large Amazon data center in New Carlisle, Ind., which will eventually consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power a million homes.
Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.
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