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The new deal will take Google’s total investments into Anthropic to more than $3bn.
Google is reportedly investing more than $1bn into Anthropic, weeks after reports surfaced that the AI start-up is nearing a separate $2bn funding deal.
First reported by the Financial Times today (22 January), the new deal would take Google’s total investments into the OpenAI-rival to more than $3bn in two years.
Additionally, Anthropic’s $2bn funding round, reportedly to be led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, would push the three-year-old company to a $60bn valuation. Reports suggest that the start-up’s annualised revenue for 2024 grew to $1bn.
Google’s latest billion-dollar deal with Anthropic follows a $2bn investment into the start-up in 2023, which included a $500m cash infusion and an additional $1.5bn over time. Earlier that year, Google invested $300m in the company for a 10pc stake, and around the same time, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its “preferred cloud provider” with the companies “co-develop[ing] AI computing systems”.
Moreover, Amazon has pumped $8bn into Anthropic over the years, starting with a $1.25bn initial investment in 2023, giving the e-commerce giant a minority stake in the business, followed by $2.75bn in March 2024, and an additional $4bn last November.
Last year, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority investigated Google’s parent company Alphabet and its links with Anthropic. However, it concluded that their proposed deal 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, which was founded in 2021 by a number of former OpenAI employees, stands as strong competition against the ChatGPT-maker, which is currently valued at nearly $160bn. The Claude-maker calls itself an “AI safety and research company”, even developing a framework for assessing different AI capabilities to respond to emerging risks.
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 its AI models.
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