Anthropic in talks to raise up to $5B at $170B valuation, just 3 months after $3.5B round

Anthropic is back in the fundraising spotlight—this time with much higher stakes.

Less than three months after raising $3.5 billion, the Amazon-backed AI startup is reportedly in talks to raise between $3 billion and $5 billion in a new round led by Iconiq Capital. The deal, if finalized, would push Anthropic’s valuation to $170 billion, nearly triple the $61.5 billion valuation back in March. CNBC confirmed the discussions, originally reported by Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter.

“Anthropic is nearing a deal to raise as much as $5 billion in a new round of funding that would value the artificial intelligence startup at $170 billion,” Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

The pace of funding—and the spike in valuation—speaks volumes about investor appetite in this phase of the AI boom. Back in March, Lightspeed Venture Partners led a $3.5 billion round that valued Anthropic at $61.5 billion. Now, just weeks later, the startup is eyeing nearly three times that.

The funding talks follow rising interest from Middle Eastern investors, according to the Financial Times, which reported last week that Anthropic’s valuation could land closer to $150 billion, depending on the investors involved.

There’s been a shift in strategy behind the scenes. A leaked memo shared with Wired suggests CEO Dario Amodei is warming up to the idea of accepting money from Gulf sovereign wealth funds—despite previously warning about the risks of granting “soft power” to authoritarian regimes. In the memo, Amodei acknowledged that it’s become “substantially harder to stay on the frontier” without access to that capital, CNBC wrote.

Just last year, Anthropic drew a hard line, reportedly rejecting funding from Saudi Arabia as it secured new investors. Now, that door appears to be opening again—just as other major players are doing the same. OpenAI, for instance, is still working through a $40 billion raise and is collaborating with Emirati firm G42 to build a major data center in Abu Dhabi. Its most recent round put its valuation at around $300 billion.

Anthropic has been riding a wave of momentum ever since launching its Claude chatbot in March 2023. Founded by former OpenAI executives, the San Francisco-based company has positioned itself as a serious competitor in the race for AI dominance. Claude now stands alongside ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini as one of the leading enterprise-facing AI assistants on the market.

And the traction is showing up in the numbers.

According to a source who spoke with CNBC, Anthropic hit $1 billion in annualized revenue by December—a tenfold increase in just one year. The majority of that comes from enterprise sales. Its client list spans from fast-growing startups like Cursor, Codeium, and Replit to major corporations like Zoom, Snowflake, Pfizer, Thomson Reuters, and Novo Nordisk.

Amazon is playing a central role in Anthropic’s growth. The company’s tech now powers Alexa+, bringing Claude into millions of homes through Prime. That partnership, along with backing from Google and others, has helped turn Anthropic into one of the most talked-about players in AI.

Founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, and Tom Brown, Anthropic was built with a focus on building AI that is “steerable, interpretable, and robust.” Before co-founding the company, Daniela Amodei served as OpenAI’s VP of safety and policy.

Now, just four years later, they’re chasing a valuation that puts them within striking distance of OpenAI itself.

If the round closes at the high end, Anthropic would be valued at nearly triple its last round—proving once again that in this phase of the AI race, speed and scale are everything.