Anthropic, a prominent artificial intelligence start-up, said on Thursday that it had completed a new funding round that valued the company at $380 billion, more than doubling its valuation since its last funding round in September.
With the deal, Anthropic raised an additional $30 billion, which includes investments from Nvidia and Microsoft. The funding arrives amid speculation that Anthropic, which makes the online chatbot Claude, is considering an initial public offering in the next 12 to 18 months.
The fund-raising round is 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 chatbots and other A.I. technologies requires enormous amounts of capital, raw computing power and data.
Anthropic’s latest deal was led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and Coatue, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund. Other investors including MGX, an A.I.-focused investment firm created by the United Arab Emirates, and QIA, a Qatari sovereign wealth fund. The Qatari fund was previously an investor in Anthropic.
The start-up has raised a total of more than $57 billion since it was founded in 2021, including from venture capital firms such as Menlo Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners and tech giants like Amazon and Google.
OpenAI, Anthropic’s primary rival, is in talks for a new funding round that could value that company at around $750 billion. The start-up is currently valued at $500 billion.
Like Anthropic, OpenAI is considering an initial public offering over the next few years. And it also is working to raise money from various sovereign wealth funds. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, recently flew to the Middle East for talks with multiple funds in the region.
(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 Amodei siblings created Anthropic to build A.I. with safety guardrails and 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. Google has invested around $3 billion and controls around 14 percent of the company, according to court documents.
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. The money from these two tech giants is included in Anthropic’s latest funding round.
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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