AI startup Anthropic is in talks to raise $750 million to continue development of its chatbot, according to The Information, citing sources within the company.
Insiders said the firm’s valuation ahead of the anticipated investment round was $18.4 billion.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees who left the company due to disagreements over the direction of the business. The startup is developing the Claude chatbot.
The firm positions its product as a safe neural network, designed to minimise the potential harm from artificial intelligence. The project is also registered as a so-called ‘public-benefit corporation’.
In early 2023, media reported that Anthropic raised $300 million from Google. In March, Spark Capital invested the same amount in the AI startup. At that time, its valuation reached $4.1 billion.
In August, Anthropic raised $100 million from South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom. In September, Amazon announced strategic investments in the startup totalling up to $4 billion. Later, Google pledged to allocate an additional $2 billion to the project.
In November, Anthropic unveiled a new Claude 2.1 chatbot model with an expanded context window of 200,000 tokens, equivalent to 500 pages of text.
According to the developers, the AI takes ‘a few minutes’ to process and fulfil a request.