The AI ​​startup is in high demand. After Amazon, Google is now also considering a billion-dollar investment in Anthropic, the company behind Claude 2.

According to The Information, this is an investment that could amount to two billion dollars. Both companies are said to be still in full negotiations. Anthropic is actively looking for investors and wants to increase its market value to twenty to thirty billion dollars. There’s still a long way to go from that, the company was worth $4 billion in March, but with Google and Amazon as potential investors it’s already well on its way to achieving that goal.

Rising star

Why are tech bigwigs eager to pump capital into Anthropic? The company has only been around for two years, but alongside OpenAI, it is considered the rising star of the AI ​​industry. Anthropic’s best-known product is Claude 2, a generative AI bot that has similar capabilities to ChatGPT. With Zoom and Salesforce, among other things, the startup can look back on an impressive customer list.

Anthropic can put the investments to good use. The company wants to develop Claude-Next that would be ten times more powerful than today’s top models, but that would cost a lot of money. Anthropic says it will need at least $1 billion over the next year and a half and aims to raise $5 billion in two years. Like OpenAI, Anthropic has launched a paid subscription for Claude, but it doesn’t bring in enough to continue to finance the high costs.

It remains unclear why Google would want to open its funding to Anthropic. During the Pixel launch event last night, Google made it clear that it has a lot of plans for AI in the coming months, but would rather build the models for Bard and Co. itself. This is different from Amazon, where there is less pre-built AI. In addition, Amazon is already trying to lure Anthropic into the AWS cloud.

Competitor OpenAI is also looking for fresh money. This company is sponsored by Microsoft, but also hopes to attract other major parties.