Google to invest fresh $1 bln in OpenAI rival Anthropic

Google is making a fresh investment of more than $1 billion into AI startup and OpenAI rival, Anthropic. This comes after reports started coming earlier in January that Anthropic was nearing a $2 billion fundraise in a round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, valuing the firm at about $60 billion. This new Google investment is, however, separate from the Lightspeed funding round.

Google’s interest in Anthropic

The AI race started when Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. The growing popularity of the company and new product launches helped it close a $6.6 billion funding round in October, potentially taking its valuation to $157 billion.

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Google did not want to stay behind in this race and already has an existing commitment of $2 billion in Anthropic as part of Google AI strategy. E-commerce giant Amazon, on the other hand, doubled its Anthropic funding to $8 billion late last year.

In November, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) proposed unwinding Google’s partnership with Anthropic as part of an antitrust case concerning online search. The proposal aims to prevent Google from collaborating with companies influencing consumer search, including AI products, challenging Google’s investment in Anthropic

The annualized revenue of Anthropic hit about $875 million, and it sells access to its models directly and through third-party cloud services including Amazon Web Services. The development of large language models requires expensive computing as well as top talent.

In March 2024, Anthropic introduced the Claude 3 family of AI models, including Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus.

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