Anthropic secures further funding to compete against OpenAI

Plenty of activity at AI unicorn Anthropic this month as the company confirmed it had secured another $3.5 billion in funding - bringing the total raised to $18.2 billion, according to Crunchbase. 

This latest round of funding comes shortly after the launch of its hybrid AI reasoning model Claude Sonnet 3.7.  Although smaller than the massive $6.6 billion funding round obtained by OpenAI late last year, it puts Amazon-backed Anthropic on a stronger footing to compete with OpenAI. The company says it will use the funding to “advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion”. 

Speaking to Tech Target, Futurum Group analyst David Nicholson said he thought it likely that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic would continue as standalone businesses in the long term. He sees their technology as a feature of other systems, rather than standalone, and integrating it into company systems is a challenge. 

Anthropic has to date emphasised its mission to build reliable and ethical AI systems. But this week it removed from its website the voluntary commitments it made in 2023 to promote safe and trustworthy AI. These commitments, made during the Biden administration, included pledges to share information on managing AI risks and to research AI bias and discrimination. The removal was first reported by The Midas Project, an AI watchdog group. 

Anthropic has already adopted many of the practices outlined in the commitments and TechCrunch suggested that their removal is more to do with the change of administration in the US than any change in thinking. Anthropic, like other AI companies, is actively chasing government contracts, and it was quick to rebut any suggestion that its commitment to transparency or user trust might be in question. A statement from the company said: “We remain committed to the voluntary AI commitments established under the Biden Administration. This progress and specific actions continue to be reflected in [our] transparency center within the content. To prevent further confusion, we will add a section directly citing where our progress aligns.”