AI Startup Anthropic Raising Funding Valuing it at $60 Billion - Slashdot

Anthropic, the AI safety-focused startup behind the Claude model family, is reportedly in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a funding round that would value the company at $60 billion. The round is led by venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to sources familiar with the matter. This valuation, which includes the new capital, represents a tripling of Anthropic's previous $18 billion valuation from a Menlo Ventures-led round just last year—highlighting the explosive investor demand for frontier AI companies.

The deal would make Anthropic the fifth most valuable U.S. startup, trailing only SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks, per CB Insights. The raise is part of a broader dealmaking frenzy in AI: OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion round in October that nearly doubled its value to $157 billion, while Elon Musk's xAI and search startup Perplexity also secured funding at sharply higher valuations. For Anthropic, the capital influx is expected to fuel continued scaling of its Claude models, expand compute infrastructure, and intensify the race against OpenAI and Google DeepMind.