AI start-up Anthropic raises $450 million from Google and Spark Capital

Artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic has raised $450 million to develop a rival to ChatGPT, in a sign that investment in the sector will continue, even as questions arise over how the technology should be regulated.

The round was led by Spark Capital, a San Francisco-based venture fund that previously invested in Twitter and Coinbase, with participation from Google, Salesforce and Zoom.

Dario Amodi, chief executive of Anthropic and former head of AI security at OpenAI, said the funding would support “products that advance AI research and security”. Amodei was part of a group of OpenAI researchers who split from the organization in 2021 to set up Anthropic.

“Our team is focused on AI alignment techniques that allow AI systems to better handle adversarial interactions, follow precise instructions, and generally be more transparent about their behavior and limitations,” the company said.

Anthropic didn’t disclose its latest valuation, but had raised at least $1 billion before the raise it announced Tuesday. At the end of 2022, Google will invest around $300 million in the company and in return will take a 10 percent stake.

Money has flowed into AI start-ups over the past six months, fueling the race to develop increasingly powerful tools to improve productivity, open the door to breakthroughs in medicine and make the Internet more easily navigable.

OpenAI received a multi-billion dollar investment from Microsoft this year, valuing the company at around $30bn. Rival start-ups including Inflection and Fog are also raising money.

The pace of investment has picked up as AI start-ups have driven through a series of technological breakthroughs since OpenAI launched its chatbot ChatGPT in November. But the warnings about the social effects of the technology have also become stark.

Even among the founders of AI companies, there are fears that the growing sophistication of chatbots capable of generating long, varied and often creative responses from short prompts could lead to massive job losses and dislocation across large swaths of the economy.

Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, wrote in a blog post on Monday that it was “conceived that within the next ten years, AI systems will exceed expert skill levels in most domains, and will be able to operate within one of today’s largest corporations.” Will do more productive activity in the form of”.

“We can have a dramatically more prosperous future; But we have to manage risk to get there,” wrote Altman, who is raising $100 million for a separate project to create a global cryptocurrency that could be delivered as a universal basic income if AI were to scale. But cuts jobs.

US President Joe Biden and European leaders have convened executives from various AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, to discuss a regulatory framework in which the technology can develop safely.