AI Startup Anthropic Reportedly Looking to Raise $300 Million

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic is reportedly looking to raise $300 million.

The deal would value the firm at $4.1 billion, The Information reported Wednesday (March 8), citing unnamed sources.

Anthropic has already raised $1.1 billion from investors that include Google and former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, according to the report.

The firm is led by executives who were previously with ChatGPT creator OpenAI; focuses on ensuring its systems don’t have bias, toxicity or other negative traits, and is registered as a public benefit corporation, the report said.

Anthropic said Wednesday in a thread on Twitter that Salesforce Ventures is investing in the company as part of its generative AI fund.

“We’re excited to partner with Salesforce to bring our trustworthy, conversational AI assistant Claude to more businesses in a responsible and ethical way,” Anthropic President Daniela Amodei said in the thread. “Anthropic and Salesforce share a vision for creating innovative technology that is rooted in safety, and we’re looking forward to introducing more useful AI services into the world.”

This news comes about a month after Google Cloud announced a partnership with Anthropic and that the AI company chose Google as its preferred cloud provider.

While the announcement did not mention Google’s investment, the Financial Times reported that the tech giant invested $300 million.

In April 2022, Anthropic raised $580 million in a Series B round led by Bankman-Fried.

“With this fundraise, we’re going to explore the predictable scaling properties of machine learning systems, while closely examining the unpredictable ways in which capabilities and safety issues can emerge at scale,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said at the time. “We’ve made strong initial progress on understanding and steering the behavior of AI systems, and are gradually assembling the pieces needed to make usable, integrated AI systems that benefit society.”

The latest report about Anthropic comes about six weeks after OpenAI said it is getting a “multiyear, multibillion dollar investment from Microsoft” after having received earlier investments from the firm in 2019 and 2021.

The announcement did not specify the amount of the investment or the timeframe, but a report by Bloomberg News — citing unnamed sources — pegged the value of the funding at $10 billion over the course of 10 years.