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Amazon pumped $2.75bn into the start-up last year, completing a $4bn deal with the company.
AI start-up Anthropic is nearing a deal to raise $2bn in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, a move that gives the three-year old company a $60bn valuation, sources told the Wall Street Journal.
This comes after Amazon’s massive $4bn investment into Anthropic last November, which followed a previous $4bn deal in September 2023, designed as a $1.25bn initial investment into the start-up in 2023, giving Amazon a minority stake in the business, followed by $2.75bn in March 2024.
As part of the 2023 deal, Anthropic agreed to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider and to use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models, while the two companies also announced that they will work together on improving the chips in the future.
In October 2023, Google agreed to invest $2bn in Anthropic, which included a $500m initial cash infusion and an additional $1.5bn over time. Earlier that year, Google invested $300m in the company for a 10pc stake. Around the same time, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its “preferred cloud provider” with the companies “co-develop[ing] AI computing systems”.
Last year, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority investigated Google’s parent company Alphabet and its links with Anthropic. It concluded that it did not qualify for an investigation, finding that Alphabet would not have “material influence” over the AI start-up as a result of the partnership.
Anthropic, the start-up behind the AI chatbot Claude, burst onto the scene at a time when businesses were beginning to jump on the generative AI (GenAI) train.
Created by several former OpenAI employees in 2021, the ‘public benefit corporation’ calls itself an “AI safety and research company”, even developing a framework for assessing different AI capabilities to respond to emerging risks.
Anthropic is viewed as a competitor to the GenAI giant OpenAI, a company no stranger to controversies, which recently decided to shift towards becoming a for-profit corporation, breaking away from its previous non-profit company structure.
However, last year a trio of authors took Anthropic to court over claims that the company used pirated versions of various copyrighted material to train Claude.
In a filing with a US district court in California, the plaintiffs claim that the “largescale theft of copyrighted works” is a key component of Anthropic’s business model, adding that the company has “taken multiple steps to hide the full extent of its copyright theft”. Anthropic however, denies these claims.
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