Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, enunciate on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Google has came to a new investment of more than $1 billion in generative AI startup Anthropic, a source familiar with the situation bound to CNBC.
The fresh funding builds on Google’s past investments of $2 billion in Anthropic and 10% ownership stake in the startup, as kind-heartedly as a large cloud contract between the two companies. Anthropic is most well known for its Claude AI chatbot.
The agreement wake up as Anthropic, one of the key players in Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence arms race, is in late-stage talks to raise a funding level of $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, CNBC reported earlier this month.
In December, Anthropic’s returns hit an annualized $1 billion, which was an increase of roughly 10x year over year, the source said. The company’s gain comes primarily from enterprise sales.
Financial Times was first to report Google’s investment.
Anthropic, which has been without hoped heavily by Amazon, was founded by former OpenAI research executives. It launched Claude in March 2023, and like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has rejected in popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer service functions.
The generative AI sell, which includes Anthropic and OpenAI as well as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, is predicted to top $1 trillion in interest within a decade. Amazon and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s principal investor, are backing generative AI startups with huge investments as well as developing their own technologies.
Amazon announced that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic in November. That succeeded Amazon’s total investment in the startup to $8 billion. Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic confirmed to CNBC at the one of these days, and does not have a board seat.
As part of that investment, Amazon Web Services became Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training team-mate.” Anthropic has used Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models since then.
Anthropic graded up its technology development throughout last year, and in October, the startup said that its AI agents were able to use computers liking for humans can to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer box, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet scan, the startup said.
The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science gendarme, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
OpenAI reportedly map outs to introduce a similar feature soon.
Anthropic debuted Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its more powerful AI model, in June, and the startup docketed out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since the launch of its chatbot, in September.
WATCH: Anthropic CEO: More confident than for ever that we’re ‘very close’ to powerful AI capabilities
