A.I. Start-Up Anthropic Closes Deal That Values It at $61.5 Billion

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence start-up, announced on Monday that it had finalized a new funding round, bringing its valuation to $61.5 billion—an increase from approximately $16 billion just over a year ago.

The latest investment, led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, injects an additional $3.5 billion into the company. Since its establishment in 2021, Anthropic has secured over $14.8 billion in funding from investors such as Menlo Ventures, as well as tech giants including Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.

This deal comes as funding activity surges for the industry’s leading A.I. start-ups. OpenAI is nearing completion of a $40 billion funding round that would raise its valuation to $300 billion—nearly doubling its worth in just five months. Meanwhile, xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, is in discussions for a financing round that could push its valuation to as much as $75 billion, up from roughly $40 billion two months prior, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The current wave of investment follows OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, which ignited a funding boom that funneled billions into A.I. start-ups. However, investor enthusiasm for the sector cooled in 2024 as several high-profile start-ups were absorbed by major tech corporations like Google and Amazon. Despite this, renewed interest has emerged as companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, with its chatbot Claude, continue to enhance their A.I. capabilities.

(The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement related to A.I.-generated news content. Both OpenAI and Microsoft have denied the accusations.)

Anthropic was founded by CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, President Daniela Amodei, with the goal of developing A.I. systems with built-in safeguards. Several of the company’s founding members previously worked at OpenAI but departed following disagreements over the funding and deployment of its technology through Microsoft.

In a 2023 podcast interview, Mr. Amodei estimated a 10 to 25 percent chance that A.I. could lead to human extinction. However, by October of that year, he adopted a more optimistic perspective, publishing a 14,000-word essay highlighting A.I.’s potential benefits.

“I think most people are underestimating how transformative A.I. could be, just as they are underestimating the severity of its risks,” he wrote.

A month later, Anthropic secured a $4 billion investment from Amazon, its largest backer, which has now contributed a total of $8 billion to the start-up. The company develops and runs its A.I. systems using computing infrastructure provided by Amazon and Google.