OpenAI rival Anthropic is in talks to raise another $2 billion in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The round, reported by The Journal, values Anthropic at $60 billion and brings Anthropic's total raised to $15.7 billion, according to Crunchbase data. The company will also become the fifth most valuable startup in the United States, behind SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks.
AI companies are under pressure to raise huge sums of money to fund the development and expansion of technology that tends to require incredible amounts of computing power. OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in a funding round last October, and Elon Musk's AI startup xAI raised $6 billion in November.
If Anthropic's new round is successful, it would add to the $4 billion the company raised from Amazon in November 2024. As part of that deal, Anthropic will make Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud computing division, its primary AI model training partner to help optimize Amazon's AI accelerator chips.