Photo Credit: Anthropic
Google has announced another $1 billion investment into Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the AI company to $3 billion. That’s still peanuts compared to Amazon’s total $8 billion investment in Anthropic.
Anthropic is known for its Claude suite of AI models and has been raising capital to expand its computing infrastructure. The new investment gives Google a 10% ownership stake in the start up as well as a large cloud contract between the two companies, as reported by CNBC. Anthropic is in late-stage talks to raise an additional $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation.
In December, Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $800M—a rough increase of 10x year-over-year. Most of Anthropic’s revenue comes from enterprise sales. The company was founded by former OpenAI research executives, with the Claude model launching in March 2023. Claude has exploded in popularity as businesses incorporate chatbots across their sales, marketing, and customer service functions.
CNBC reports that the generative AI market is expected to top $1 trillion in revenue over the next decade. Amazon and Microsoft have backed OpenAI while developing their own technologies.
Amazon announced another $4 billion tranche of funds for Anthropic in November 2024. Despite the massive investment, Amazon remains a minority investor and does not have a board seat. But as part of that deal, Amazon Web Services became Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner.”
Anthropic debuted Claude 3.5 Sonnet as its most powerful artificial intelligence model yet. “It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions, and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with natural, relatable tone,” Anthropic said during the announcement of Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
At the time Anthropic introduced ‘Artifacts,’ which it described as a dynamic workspace that allows users to edit and build upon Claude’s creations in real-time. “So much of what we were hearing from enterprise businesses is people are kind of using Claude at the office already,” Daniela Amodei, Anthropic Co-Founder told CNBC in an interview in July 2024.