Fearless of DeepSeek's impact! OpenAI's strong competitor Anthropic's latest round of financing far exceeds expectations

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, OpenAI's rival Anthropic is finalizing a new round of financing. Anthropic is negotiating a $3.5 billion funding round, significantly exceeding previous expectations. Anthropic initially planned to raise $2 billion, but successfully increased the funding amount during negotiations with investors, highlighting continued strong interest from investors.

Anthropic's previous valuation was $18 billion, and the latest funding will increase its valuation to approximately three times that, reaching $61.5 billion. The $61.5 billion valuation includes the cash raised in this round.

Insiders revealed that this round of financing is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with General Catalyst and Bessemer Venture Partners also participating. The Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX is also in talks to participate.

According to insiders, Anthropic's annualized revenue (projected revenue for the next 12 months based on recent sales) has reached approximately $1.2 billion. However, the company is still operating at a loss. In contrast, OpenAI informed investors during its funding round last October that its revenue for 2024 is expected to reach $3.7 billion.

Details regarding Anthropic's latest funding round have not yet been disclosed.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic is considered one of the few AI startups with sufficient talent and funding to compete with OpenAI. Although Anthropic still lags behind OpenAI in the consumer market, its Claude chatbot is becoming increasingly popular among programmers and enterprise clients.

Anthropic plans to use this round of financing to support the training of more powerful AI models. On the same day, Anthropic released its smartest AI model to date, featuring both "reasoning mode" and "traditional mode":

The company stated that the Claude 3.7 Sonnet, this "hybrid" model, possesses the ability of both "reasoning mode" (pausing to think through complex answers) and traditional mode (generating answers in real-time), claiming that it is the only such "hybrid" model on the market.

Analysts believe that this move will help Anthropic gain the much-needed advantage in the fierce competition among tech companies.

Since DeepSeek launched its new model, some Silicon Valley investors have expressed concerns about the prospects of AI companies like Anthropic, as DeepSeek's model performance rivals that of the strongest AI in the U.S., but at only a fraction of the cost and is available for free.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previously published a blog post arguing that DeepSeek's breakthroughs will not change the economic model of AI research and development. He believes that the reduced training costs of DeepSeek align with industry trends and do not represent a groundbreaking technological achievement

If the trend of declining AI training costs is four times per year, and if the training cost of DeepSeek-V3 is about eight times lower than the current U.S. model developed a year ago, then this is completely in line with the normal trend. Even accepting the training cost data from DeepSeek, they are only on the trend line and may not have fully reached it yet.

Analysis indicates that Anthropic's unexpectedly high round of financing shows that investors are still willing to bet on companies developing proprietary AI models.

Previously, it was reported that OpenAI is also negotiating a new round of financing of up to $40 billion, with a valuation reaching $300 billion. In addition, Musk's xAI has also had informal financing discussions with potential investors