Today's Edition
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP)
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Thursday it has raised $65 billion in a new funding round that values the Claude maker at $965 billion, putting it on the cusp of a trillion-dollar valuation ahead of an expected IPO in the coming months.
"This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens," said Krishna Rao, Anthropic's chief financial officer.
Anthropic's near-trillion-dollar valuation puts it ahead of OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion in March and is aiming to go public as early as this year.
Elon Musk's SpaceX, which absorbed his AI company, xAI, in February, could see shares begin trading as early as June 12, targeting a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion in what would be the largest IPO in history.
Anthropic's round was led by major Silicon Valley venture capitalists Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.
It also included $15 billion in previously committed investments from cloud giants, including $5 billion from Amazon.
Semiconductor firms Micron, Samsung and SK hynix also participated as strategic infrastructure partners.
The company said Claude is now the first frontier AI model available across all three of the world's largest cloud platforms -- Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
