Google Invests $1 bn in Anthropic 

Tech giant Google is reportedly investing over $1 billion in Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude language models. 

This new investment is separate from the company’s earlier reported funding round of nearly $2 billion earlier this month, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, to bump the company’s valuation to about $60 billion. 

In 2023, Google had invested $300 million in Anthropic, acquiring a 10% stake in the company. In November last, Amazon led Anthropic’s $4 billion fundraising effort, raising its overall funding to $8 billion for the company. 

Big tech companies are more interested in Anthropic than ever, thanks to their powerful family of Claude models that compete with OpenAI’s products. Recently, Microsoft, which has backed OpenAI, integrated Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model into the coding assistant GitHub Copilot. At the World Economic Forum at Davos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expressed that he had never felt more confident than he did at that moment about the proximity of powerful AI systems. 

“What I’ve seen inside Anthropic and out of that over the last few months led me to believe that we’re on track for human-level systems that surpass humans in every task within 2–3 years,” Amodei said. 

He also announced plans to build a “virtual collaborator,” a comprehensive AI agent that can autonomously handle multiple everyday tasks. 

In October 2024, OpenAI, Anthropic’s leading competitor, had raised $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion. 

In December, the company launched their powerful o3 family of models, which outperformed every other model in benchmarks. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman also revealed that after external testing by safety researchers, the o3 mini model will be released in the coming weeks.