AI chatbot Anthropic said to be in GIC-led funding talks at US$350 billion valuation

[SAN FRANCISCO] Anthropic, the high-flying artificial intelligence (AI) startup that makes the Claude chatbot, plans to raise US$10 billion in funding that would value it at roughly US$350 billion, nearly doubling its valuation from just four months ago, according to three sources with knowledge of the matter.

Talks over the financing, which would be led by Coatue Management as well as GIC, which is Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and other shareholders, come amid speculation that Anthropic is eyeing an initial public offering in the next 12 to 18 months as rivals such as OpenAI race to add more capital to their coffers. The financing discussions are ongoing, and the plans could change.

Anthropic, which is based in San Francisco, declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported on the funding talks.

The discussions are another sign of the investment frenzy around AI, which has driven concerns about a bubble and raised questions about the viability of AI businesses. Developing AI products such as chatbots is costly, requiring enormous amounts of capital, energy and data for the computing resources to train the programmes.

In October, OpenAI closed a deal that values the company at US$500 billion. On Tuesday (Jan 6), Elon Musk’s xAI said that it had raised US$20 billion in a funding round that most likely put its value at above US$230 billion.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei. They had left OpenAI after disagreements over how its technologies were being funded and released through Microsoft. The Amodeis created Anthropic to build AI with safety guardrails. They also structured the company as a public benefit corporation, which is aimed at creating public and social good.

In 2024, Anthropic raised US$8 billion from Amazon, its largest investor. Google has invested around US$3 billion and controls around 14 per cent of the company, according to court documents obtained by The Times. In total, Anthropic has raised at least US$40 billion in financing, according to data compiled by PitchBook, which tracks startups.

Anthropic closed its previous funding round in September, in a deal that valued it at US$183 billion. At the end of the year, Microsoft and Nvidia also said they would invest roughly US$15 billion in Anthropic.

As it works to improve its AI technologies and deliver them to businesses and consumers, Anthropic is spending tens of billions on data centre hardware that powers AI.

Late last year, the company said it planned to spend US$50 billion on data centres in Texas and New York alongside a cloud company, Fluidstack. But Anthropic did not specify how it planned to fund the project.

The company is also spending billions to buy computing power from Google and Amazon. Anthropic will be the primary user of a jaw-droppingly large Amazon data centre in New Carlisle, Indiana, which will eventually consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power one million homes. NYTIMES