Anthropic is nearing a funding round led by Iconiq Capital that would value the company at $170 billion, injecting fresh capital needed to stay competitive with OpenAI, Bloomberg and CNBC reported Wednesday.
The new funding round would more than double Anthropic’s current valuation of $61.5 billion. The AI company is expected to raise between $3 billion and $5 billion. Last week, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic’s upcoming valuation could reach $150 billion, following talks with a number of investors in the Middle East.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was previously seen as reluctant to raise funding from Middle Eastern investors but has since changed course. Its biggest rival, Sam Altman’s OpenAI, has also turned to the Middle East for funding in recent months. OpenAI was valued at $300 billion earlier this year and is in the process of raising billions of dollars from investors led by SoftBank. The San Francisco-based AI company is also working with Emirati firm G42 to build a massive data center in Abu Dhabi, signs that AI startups increasingly rely on Middle Eastern funding to fasten model development and outpace competitors.
Anthropic competes with OpenAI, Google, Meta, Elon Musk’s xAI, and other major tech companies to develop AI models capable of generating text, code, images, and videos that can be scaled and deployed.
So far, OpenAI is leading the race with its AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which has over 500 million weekly users. However, Anthropic’s Claude is emerging as a major player in coding and is increasingly being adopted by developers and software engineers.
There is a race in Silicon Valley to develop the best general-purpose AI model; however, AI startups are increasingly focusing on specialised models.
The industry is anticipating the release of GPT-5, OpenAI’s next model, which has been in the works for months and is expected to launch in August this year.
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Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI are profitable, with both startups using funding to cover the massive costs of compute power needed to train AI models. Anthropic is backed by Amazon and Google.
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