The company has been established for four years and is preparing to raise a financing of $10 billion.
Shocking news has once again emerged in the AI industry: Anthropic, a startup founded just four years ago, is nearing a new financing deal worth $10 billion, double the previously rumored $5 billion in the market. According to Bloomberg, this amount has increased significantly due to strong investor demand.
The scale of this round of financing is astonishing. The financing negotiations are still ongoing, and the final amount may still be adjusted. However, there is no doubt that this will set a new record for a single - round financing in the artificial intelligence field. After the completion of this round of financing, Anthropic's valuation is expected to reach $170 billion, ranking among the top in the history of global startup valuations.
It is reported that this round of financing is led by Iconiq Capital, with well - known investment institutions such as TPG Inc., Lightspeed Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Menlo Ventures actively participating. Sovereign wealth funds such as the Qatar Investment Authority and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) are also in in - depth negotiations to join the investment.
With the participation of the latter two sovereign wealth funds, this billion - dollar financing event has gone beyond the scope of technology giants' competition for AI dominance and has become another important strategic layout at the national level in the field of artificial intelligence.
OpenAI Heritage
Although people have long heard of Anthropic, it is necessary to briefly introduce the background of this company.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. The core team of this company has an impressive background; they are the early developers of the GPT series of products.
Dario Amodei holds degrees from top universities such as Stanford and Princeton, majoring in physics and later switching to neuroscience. In the early stage of his career, he worked at Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Laboratory as a researcher under Andrew Ng and later moved to Google as a senior researcher.
In 2016, he joined OpenAI, where he was in charge of the company's security and led the team to develop GPT - 2 and GPT - 3. At the end of 2020, due to differences in the development direction of OpenAI, mainly the potential commercialization tendency caused by Microsoft's investment and the neglect of AI safety research, Dario Amodei decided to co - found Anthropic with his sister, a company with values different from those of OpenAI. The company positions itself as an "artificial intelligence safety and research company" and is committed to building reliable, interpretable, and controllable AI systems. The name "Anthropic" itself means "related to humans".
Let's take a look at the company's product development timeline. Anthropic's main product is the AI chatbot Claude series.
In March 2023, the company released Claude, an AI dialogue system similar to ChatGPT.
On July 11, 2023, Anthropic released the new large - language model Claude 2. Compared with the previous version, Claude 2 has improved performance and can handle longer text responses, with significant improvements in programming, mathematics, reasoning, etc.
On March 4, 2024, the company released the Claude 3 model family. Claude 3 is the first model by Anthropic to introduce multimodal capabilities, capable of processing and analyzing various data types such as documents, images, and videos. The company said that in various benchmark tests, Claude 3 Opus in this family outperformed OpenAI's GPT - 4 and Google's Gemini 1.0 Ultra.
On October 22, 2024, the company announced the launch of the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, claiming that it would achieve the effect of "as if a person is working in front of a computer".
On February 25, 2025, Anthropic launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet, claiming it to be the most intelligent model to date and the first hybrid - reasoning model on the market.
Anthropic's business performance is also remarkable. Anthropic mainly adopts a B2B business model. According to data disclosed by the company to some investors, Anthropic's annualized revenue quadrupled in the first half of this year, exceeding $4 billion. Recall that during the financing in February 2025, Anthropic had achieved an annualized revenue of $1 billion, about 10 times that of the previous year, and the price - to - sales ratio was 60 times at that time.
Along with the revenue growth, the number of employees has also increased. As of 2024, the company had 915 employees, and it is expected that by the end of 2025, the total number of employees will exceed 1,900.
Although the entire industry is still making huge investments, leading AI companies have demonstrated strong commercialization capabilities. Especially OpenAI. In August, it was reported that OpenAI's revenue this year is expected to triple to $12.7 billion. In March this year, the company's annual recurring revenue had reached $10 billion. Its Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar mentioned in a recent interview that OpenAI achieved a single - month revenue of $1 billion for the first time in July.
Currently, Anthropic's Claude, along with Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT, has become one of the three AI services approved for use by US government agencies.
The Financing Race Dominated by Amazon and Google
Anthropic is regarded as OpenAI's biggest rival, and its financing journey has been highly successful. Since its establishment, it has completed multiple rounds of large - scale financing. Among them, technology giants such as Amazon and Google have been the most active in supporting Anthropic.
In the Series A financing in May 2021, it raised $124 million, led by Skype co - founder Jaan Tallinn, with follow - on investments from Facebook co - founder Dustin Moskovitz. This capital helped Anthropic build a team and conduct basic research in its early days.
In the Series B financing in April 2022, it completed a $580 - million financing, mainly led by Sam Bankman - Fried, the founder of FTX.
In 2023, as the popularity of the AI industry continued to rise, Google and Amazon began to heavily invest in Anthropic and became major shareholders. In February, it received a $300 - million investment from Google to become a strategic shareholder. In May, it raised another $450 million in the Series C financing, led by Spark Capital, with many well - known institutions participating. In September, Amazon announced an investment of $4 billion and became Anthropic's main cloud - service provider. This cooperation not only brought huge funds to Anthropic but also provided solid support in cloud - computing resources. The in - depth cooperation between the two sides has attracted wide attention in the industry. In October, Google made an additional investment of $2 billion, further demonstrating its optimism about Anthropic's development prospects.
The industry believes that Google's large - scale investment in Anthropic is equivalent to a covert competition between Google and Microsoft. Five years ago, Microsoft invested $1 billion to support OpenAI in developing ChatGPT, and Anthropic also has the strength to compete with OpenAI.
In 2024, Anthropic's financing pace remained rapid, and Amazon made another large - scale investment. In February, it completed a $750 - million Series D financing, led by Menlo Ventures. In March, it received an $884 - million investment in the secondary market, and in May, it raised another $452 million in the secondary market. In November, Amazon made an additional investment of $4 billion, consolidating the cooperation between the two sides and bringing Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to a staggering $8 billion.
In 2025, Anthropic continued to increase its financing efforts, with each round of financing being substantial. In March, it completed a $3.5 - billion Series E financing, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with new and old investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital, Fidelity Management & Research, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures participating. After the investment, the valuation reached $61.5 billion.
Then comes this new financing of up to $10 billion. With the participation of sovereign wealth funds such as the Qatar Investment Authority and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) in the shareholder lineup, this capital event will add another force, becoming a fierce competition between technology giants and sovereign wealth funds for the dominance of the next - generation AI.
As of early 2025, Anthropic has raised more than $18 billion in total, becoming one of the most influential AI unicorns globally. The AI wave has created wealth. The founding team of Anthropic has also seen their wealth multiply. Based on each person continuing to hold more than 2% of Anthropic's equity, the seven members of the founding team have all become billionaires. However, it is said that the Amodei siblings are not obsessed with wealth. La Stampa once reported that Dario Amodei adheres to the Silicon Valley creed and has little interest in wealth. Daniela Amodei once said, "Wealth is not a beneficial driving force; instead, it can affect your grand plans."
If the new financing is successfully completed, it will provide sufficient resources for Anthropic to compete with OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI. In 2025, the entire AI large - model industry is still increasing its investment, frequently setting new records for financing amounts, and there are also changes in the investment direction.
For example, OpenAI, the leader in the industry, completed a $40 - billion financing round in March this year, with a valuation of $300 billion, setting a historical record for the financing scale of an unlisted technology company. The focus of capital investment has expanded from the research and development of cutting - edge AI technologies to the construction of computing - power infrastructure, with about $18 billion earmarked for the "Stargate" project. It is reported that this is an ambitious AI infrastructure construction project aiming to build a large - scale data - center network to meet the huge computing - power demand of next - generation AI models. The project was announced by former US President Donald Trump in January 2025.
OpenAI's Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar also mentioned in a recent interview, "The biggest challenge currently is the persistent shortage of computing power."
Additionally, it was reported in April this year that Elon Musk's xAI plans to raise $20 billion. If the deal is reached, xAI's valuation may exceed $120 billion. However, there has been no further news so far.
Currently, the global artificial intelligence competition has reached a white - hot stage. The huge - scale financing of Anthropic, xAI, and OpenAI all takes place against the backdrop of the explosive global demand for AI computing power. This marks that the AI industry has entered a new stage characterized by huge capital, computing - power infrastructure, and ecological competition.
This article is from the WeChat official account "China Venture Capital", author: Riemann. Republished by 36Kr with authorization.