Photo Credit: Ashley King
Anthropic is reportedly in advanced talks to raise another $2 billion in funding. The deal would value Anthropic at $60 billion—more than triple its valuation from a year ago.
Amazon has invested a total of $8 billion in Anthropic so far. The company was one of the first investors on board in September 2023, dropping a cool $4 billion. The Bezos-founded company then returned in November 2024 with an additional $4 billion investment that was deployed in tranches. This new funding round is being led by venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The $60 billion valuation includes the money Anthropic plans to raise in this latest funding round. Based on the data from CB Insights, Anthropic would be the 5th most valuable U.S. start-up based on that valuation. Menlo Ventures valued the AI start-up at $18 billion last year shortly after the Amazon funding round.
OpenAI was most recently valued at $157 billion as of October 2024, reflecting the significant investor interest in AI. Elon Musk’s xAI is valued at $50 billion following a $6 billion Series C funding round in December 2024, while Perplexity is valued at $9 billion after securing its latest $500 million funding round.
Anthropic recently agreed to keep guardrails in place to keep copyrighted data from appearing in prompts. Under this new agreement, Anthropic will maintain its implemented filters on responses to users’ queries. It is allowed to expand, improve, optimize, or change the implementation of these guard rails as long as their overall efficacy at preventing the reproduction of copyrighted content is not diminished.
Much of Anthropic’s current funding has come from Amazon, which seeded $4 billion to the startup. Another funding round in November 2024 brings the total investment to $8 billion, with the November investment a convertible note—meaning it will translate to equity at the valuation set in the current round. The Wall Street Journal reports that Anthropic’s annualized revenue recently hit around $875 million. Most of that came from sales to businesses. Anthropic’s main competitor OpenAI recently told investors that it expects to generate $3.7 billion from sales of its premium version of ChatGPT.