Earlier this week, news broke that San Francisco-based AI startup and rival to ChatGPT Anthropic was raising a $300 million round.
On Friday it was revealed the investor offering up the money would be none other than tech titan Google — obviously not willing to stand idly by and let Microsoft win the battle for AI supremacy.
The news was first reported by the Financial Times.
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The deal — which gives Google a 10% stake in the company — comes just weeks after news broke of Microsoft’s massive investment in OpenAI.
Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude, is in closed beta mode, but in a paper detailing its goals, it is expected to combat harmful prompts by explaining why they are dangerous or misguided.
This is not Google’s and its parent Alphabet’s first foray into AI. In 2015 Alphabet bought DeepMind, a London-based AI startup founded in 2010, and is building an NLP model similar to ChatGPT.
AI dominance
The new year is shaping up to be an all-out AI war. Late last month, Microsoft finally confirmed it has agreed to a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment” into OpenAI, the startup behind the artificial intelligence tools ChatGPT and DALL-E for a reported $10 billion.
Per Crunchbase data, funding in the AI space has accounted for around 10% of all venture funding in recent years. Even last year, as venture dried up, AI flourished in its second-best funding year ever.
Just this week, it was reported by The Information that an AI startup co-founded by a pair of entrepreneurs who had left Adept AI recently raised $8 million. And Perplexity AI, which is developing a search engine that lets people ask questions through a chatbot, is looking to raise a $15 million seed round.
Anthropic’s new round could bring the company’s total valuation to $5 billion, The New York Times reported. The startup previously raised $704 million across Series A and Series B funding rounds in 2022, according to Crunchbase data.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
Clarification: This story has changed since its original publication to clarify terms of the deal.
Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the Crunchbase Daily.
More than 66,000 workers in U.S.-based tech companies have been laid off in mass job cuts so far in 2023, according to a Crunchbase News tally.
There were more layoffs in the U.S. tech sector in January than any month last year. More than 58,000 people got laid off, beating the record 44,570…
Using Crunchbase data, we assembled a series of lists highlighting funding to four categories where AI is playing an ever-larger role.
The new year did not start slowly, as U.S.-based startups saw five rounds of more than $200 million.
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- Source: https://news.crunchbase.com/ai-robotics/funding-ai-google-anthropic/