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

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AI start-up Anthropic has raised $450 million to develop a rival to ChatGPT, a sign that investment in the industry will continue even as questions grow about how best to regulate the technology.

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

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

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

Anthropic didn’t disclose its latest valuation, but it had raised at least $1 billion before the raise announced Tuesday. At the end of 2022, Google invested about 300 million dollars in the company, taking a 10 percent stake in exchange.

Money has been pouring into AI startups over the past six months, fueling a rush to develop ever more powerful tools to improve productivity, open doors to medical breakthroughs, and make the Internet more navigable.

OpenAI this year secured a multi-billion dollar investment from Microsoft which valued the company at about $30 billion. Rival start-ups, including Inflection and Cohere, have also raised funds.

The pace of investment has accelerated as AI startups have outpaced a string of technological breakthroughs since OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot in November. But warnings about the social impacts of technology have also become more stark.

Even among founders of AI companies, there are concerns that the growing sophistication of chatbots that can generate long, varied, and often creative responses from short prompts could cause widespread job losses and dislocation across large swathes of the economy.

OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman wrote in a blog post on Monday that it was “conceivable that within the next ten years, AI systems will surpass the skill level of experts in most domains and do the same productive of one of the largest companies today”. .

“We can have a dramatically more prosperous future; but we have to manage risk to get there,” wrote Altman, who is raising about $100 million for a separate project to create a global cryptocurrency that could be deployed as a universal basic income if AI leads to job cuts mass.

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