AI firm Anthropic is reportedly in talks to raise $2 billion — a deal that would put the company’s valuation at roughly $60 billion.
According to a Jan. 7 Wall Street Journal report, Lightspeed Venture Partners is leading a funding round for the OpenAI rival. Anthropic was valued at $18 billion in December 2023, suggesting that the AI firm’s valuation could have risen by more than 233% in 12 months.
Two of the Big Four tech companies — Amazon and Google — made multibillion-dollar investments in Anthropic in 2023 and 2024. Cointelegraph reached out to Anthropic regarding details of the deal but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
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Founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI, Anthropic went on to publicly release its version of an AI-powered large language model (LLM) called Claude in 2023. The LLM rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which the firm launched in 2022.
Are the robots coming for us?
Attention around artificial intelligence software surged in recent years as many speculated the industry could make certain jobs obsolete. One of the AI firms’ goals is to develop systems demonstrating artificial general intelligence.
According to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, AI could exceed human capabilities as early as 2026 based on the progression of the technology. In one of his first messages for 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made similar predictions, suggesting that AI agents could “join the workforce” and “materially change the output of companies” in the next 12 months.
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