According to Bloomberg, the artificial intelligence start-up company, Anthropic, is negotiating early financing to raise its valuation to over $150 billion, more than double its current estimate of $61.5 billion. If successful, this round of finance will remain competitive in the competition for advanced AI models.
According to four informed sources, Anthropic has initiated preliminary financing consultations with investors and has received offers from potential supporters for over $150 billion in valuations. This company, which has been in existence for only four years, is expected to raise at least $3 billion in this round of finance, one of whom is known to say that it could be up to $5 billion.
According to the source, Anthropic has approached many home-based Middle Eastern investors and has received interest from the Abu Dhabi Large AI Speculation Fund MGX. However, Anthropic was cautious about directly accepting investment in the Middle East. Last year, an Abu Dhabi State Fund associated with MGX acquired nearly $500 million in Anthropic shares from the bankrupt encrypted currency exchange FTX.
This week, CEO Dario Amordi of Anthropic warned in a memorandum to staff that accepting investment in the Middle East might “profit the dictator”. But he said, “Unfortunately, don’t let the bad guys benefit from our success.” This principle is difficult to use to operate a company.” The contents of the memorandum were first disclosed in Connected magazine.
During the financing war waged by rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic is turning his tactics towards sovereign wealth funds outside Silicon Valley. Current investors include Google and Amazon. The British Financial Times had previously reported that the Amazon was discussing additional investments over the $8 billion pledged to consolidate one of its largest shareholders.
Anthropic is in the process of developing advanced AI models for the generation of text, code and images with OpenAI, Mask’s XAI and technology giants like Google and Meta. OpenAI now leads the consumer, and its chat robot ChatGPT week is over 500 million active users. OpenAI, with an estimated $300 billion this year, is raising tens of billions of dollars from soft silver-collar investors. MGX has invested in OpenAI last year and worked with it to build the Stargate data centre project.
The Claude model under Anthropic has emerged as an increasingly important application in the programming area. But the starters and their hands are still fighting for a lasting lead. According to two sources, OpenAI expects to publish the latest model GPT-5 next month.
According to those with knowledge of Anthropic finance, its annualized recurrent income has jumped from $1 billion at the beginning of the year to over $4 billion, of which 80 per cent comes from corporate subscriptions. Despite rapid growth, neither Anthropic nor OpenAI were close to profit, and high model training calculator costs kept them “burning money”. At the same time, growing competition for talent has exacerbated financial pressures: Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg of Meta has recently launched a $100 million compensation programme for top researchers.