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Google has agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI executives, CNBC has confirmed.
The commitment includes $500 million in upfront funding and an additional $1.5 billion to be invested over time, an Anthropic spokesperson told CNBC. The Wall Street Journal had previously reported on the planned financing.
A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anthropic is the developer of Claude 2, a rival chatbot to OpenAI’s ChatGPT used by companies like Slack, Notion and Quora. The company was founded in 2021 and received funding from Salesforce and Zoom alongside Google and was valued at $4.1 billion earlier this year.
Claude 2 can summarize up to 75,000 words, which could be the length of a book. Users can enter large data sets and request summaries in the form of a memo, letter, or story. ChatGPT, on the other hand, can handle around 3,000 words.
Research from Arthur AI, a machine learning monitoring platform, has found that Claude 2 is the most reliable chatbot when it comes to “self-awareness.” This means it accurately assesses what it does and doesn’t do, and only answers questions that it has been able to support with training data. Arthur AI has tested chatbots from Meta, Cohere and OpenAI.
In April, Google invested $300 million in the company, acquiring a 10% stake. That same month, Anthropic was one of four companies invited to a meeting at the White House to discuss responsible AI development with Vice President Kamala Harris. The others were Google parent Alphabet, Microsoft and OpenAI.
Anthropic quickly turned around and raised a $450 million round in May. At the time, it was the largest funding round for an AI company since Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in January, according to PitchBook data.
Anthropic was founded by Dario Amodei, the former vice president of research at OpenAI, and his sister Daniela Amodei, the vice president of security and policy at OpenAI. Several other OpenAI research graduates were also on Anthropic’s founding team.
Amodei told CNBC in July that Anthropic had invested at least two months developing its latest chatbot, with a team of 30 to 35 people working directly on the AI model and a total of 150 people supporting it. She said the market is growing so quickly that there is plenty of room for multiple players to succeed.
“It’s a really unusual time from a business perspective because the demand for large language models is just so great and there is actually more demand than the industry can currently provide,” Amodei said at the time. “The landscape is just really broad and there’s really a lot of room for lots of different users and types of users to utilize these systems.”
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