DeepSeek’s latest model barely made a dent in Anthropic’s business, said the company’s chief product officer.
Mike Krieger said on an episode of the Twenty Minute VC podcast published Monday that the Chinese AI startup had “almost no impact” on Anthropic’s market position or go-to-market strategy.
For Anthropic — best known for its Claude AI models — success isn’t just about model performance. The company prioritizes long-term work with businesses over treating APIs as a transactional product, Krieger said.
“I want to dream big with you. I want to think about not just your API, but also Claude for work,” said Krieger, who cofounded Instagram. “What you’re providing people is AI partnership, not just AI models.”
Founded in 2023 by Chinese entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek shook up the AI industry and the US stock market with its low-cost reasoning model, R1, unveiled in January. The company said its R1 model rivals top competitors, like ChatGPT’s o1, but at a fraction of the cost.
The launch raised questions about Silicon Valley’s strategy of investing billions in data centers and cutting-edge chips for AI training.
Krieger’s comments came ahead of Anthropic’s Tuesday announcement that it had raised $3.5 billion in fresh funding at a $61.5 billion valuation.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round. Other backers included Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, General Catalyst, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Menlo Ventures, and D1 Capital Partners.
With the new investment, Anthropic plans to ramp up the development of its next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, and deepen research into AI interpretability and alignment. The company is also looking to accelerate global expansion, it said.
The funding round follows the late February launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code.
Krieger said companies are no longer just looking for simple API transactions, in which they exchange tokens for AI-generated output.
To use AI models through APIs provided by cloud companies, businesses usually pay based on the number of tokens, the units that measure the amount of data processed by AI models.
Instead, Krieger said companies want to build long-term partnerships with AI providers who can co-design products and integrate AI into their existing workflows.
DeepSeek not ‘adversaries,’ said Anthropic’s CEO
The product chief isn’t the only one at Anthropic who has downplayed DeepSeek’s impact on the company.
Earlier in January, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, wrote in a blog post that he doesn’t view the Chinese AI startup as “adversaries.”
He stressed that export controls on AI technology to China are becoming more crucial, especially considering the country’s track record on human rights and its aggressive stance internationally.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has taken a different approach, calling DeepSeek an “invigorating” competitor driving his company to accelerate the release of “better models.”
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, said in January it was too early to gauge DeepSeek’s impact on the company’s AI spending. He said that while DeepSeek has done “novel things,” it likely won’t change how Meta is investing in AI.
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