Former OpenAI executives have triggered a major surge this year in venture capital investments for Artificial Intelligence (AI) startups. The company they formed, Anthropic, has recently announced a record-breaking funding round, with a whopping $450 million, sourced from leading tech companies such as Google, Salesforce Ventures, Zoom Ventures, and Spark Capital.
Google has shown particular interest in the company, investing $300 million and taking a 10% stake in the venture. Anthropic is run by a founding team that includes Dario Amodei, who was previously OpenAI’s Vice President for Research.
Anthropic is the parent company of Claude, an AI chatbot developed to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Claude plans to become an increasingly frequent presence on tech platforms such as Slack and has already been adopted as the official chatbot of Notion, DuckDuckGo, and Quora.
This major funding is a sign of continued investor confidence in the AI industry, amid a slowdown in the general venture market since early 2022. The success of Anthropic marks its founders’ ambition and dedication to building AI models for wider public use.
Anthropic has already been invited to a meeting at the White House to discuss the ethical use of AI with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, alongside other big tech names such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
The company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has confirmed that the new funds will be used to continue developing platforms to ensure AI safety, such as Claude. Anthropic’s blog also states that its committed to AI “alignment techniques” designed to help AI systems deal more efficiently with various situations.
Anthropic is a generative AI startup that was recently founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research executives who have taken full advantage of the artificial intelligence market hype. With a current $4.1 billion valuation, the company is demonstrating the potential of AI, its applications, and the future of the industry.
