Highlights:
- The announcement comes shortly after the release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the company’s most advanced large language model.
- Anthropic recently announced that its short-term development focus will be on improving the Claude Code.
OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic PBC raised USD 3.5 billion in the later stage funding round, making its valuation to USD 61.5 billion.
This Series E round follows a USD one billion investment from Google LLC less than two months ago. Prior to that, Amazon.com Inc. doubled its investment in Anthropic to USD eight billion. Since September, Amazon Web Services has served as the company’s primary cloud provider.
Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the latest funding round also included contributions from Cisco Investments, Salesforce Ventures, and more than half a dozen other investors. Initially, Anthropic aimed to raise USD two billion but increased its target due to strong demand.
The announcement comes shortly after the release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the company’s most advanced large language model. This latest AI system integrates both standard LLM capabilities and enhanced reasoning, offering significant improvements in math, physics, and programming.
One of the standout features of Claude 3.7 Sonnet is its customizable processing time, allowing developers to control how long the model spends on a task. For quick responses, teams can limit its thinking time to just a few seconds, while more complex tasks can extend this duration to several minutes or longer.
Alongside Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic introduced Claude Code, an AI-powered coding assistant designed to automate programming tasks that typically take over 45 minutes of manual efforts. Integrated into a command line interface, the tool is described as an “agentic” coding solution.
Anthropic plans to use the Series E funding to further improve its AI systems. As part of this initiative, the company will expand its computing capacity, relying on AWS instances powered by Amazon’s in-house Trainium and Inferentia chips to support model development.
Anthropic recently announced that its short-term development focus will be on improving Claude Code. Plans include enhancing the tool’s ability to interact with external systems like code repositories and equipping it with better “self-awareness” of its own capabilities.
Additionally, a portion of the new funding will support research into mechanistic interpretability, a field focused on understanding how large language models make decisions. In a report published last year, Anthropic detailed how its researchers used this approach to analyze how an earlier version of Claude processed concepts. The company aims to deepen its understanding of LLM decision-making to develop safer AI systems.
“This investment fuels our development of more intelligent and capable AI systems that expand what humans can achieve, while deepening our understanding of how these systems work,” said Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao.
Alongside its research initiatives, Anthropic is launching an international expansion effort. Last month, the company appointed a former Google DeepMind research scientist to head a new office in Zurich, adding to its existing branch in Dublin, Ireland.
The report says that Anthropic surpassed USD one billion in annualized recurring revenue last year, with a 30% increase over the past two months. While not yet profitable, the company generates revenue through an OpenAI-style chatbot and an API that allows developers to integrate Claude into their applications.