According to foreign media reports, on Tuesday Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup based in San Francisco, announced that it had received US$450 million in Series C financing.
The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Google, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures, Zoom Ventures, and others. Before this round of financing, Google invested 300 million to 400 million US dollars in Anthropic.
The latest round of funding brings Anthropic’s total funding to nearly $1 billion, making it one of the best-funded artificial intelligence startups, the report said. The company did not disclose its valuation, but sources put it at close to $5 billion.
Anthropic says the new funding will support its continued development of useful, harmless and honest AI systems, including Claude, an AI assistant that can perform a variety of conversational and text-processing tasks.
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives, is currently competing with OpenAI, the developer behind the chatbot ChatGPT, and its Claude model is seen as the main competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4.
