Dario Amodei of Anthropic, right, arrives to the White House for a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris on artificial intelligence, Thursday, May 4, 2023, in Washington.
Evan Vucci | AP
Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research execs, is taking full advantage of the market hype.
The company on Tuesday said it raised $450 million, which marks the largest AI funding round this year since Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in January, according to PitchBook data.
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Despite a dramatic slowdown in the market for startup financing since early 2022, venture investors are still pouring cash into companies with a compelling story in generative AI, as Microsoft, Google and others race to embed new AI models into their core products.
Google is among the lead investors in Anthropic’s latest funding round, alongside Salesforce Ventures, Zoom Ventures and Spark Capital. The announcement comes two months after Anthropic raised $300 million in funding at a $4.1 billion valuation.
A month before that, Google invested $300 million in the company, taking a 10% stake. Notably, the backer is listed as Google and not one of the Alphabet’s investment arms, GV or CapitalG.
Anthropic is the company behind Claude, a rival chatbot to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It was founded by Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s former vice president of research, and his sister Daniela Amodei, who was OpenAI’s vice president of safety and policy. Several other OpenAI research alumni were also on Anthropic’s founding team.
“This is definitely a big deal in the generative AI space,” said Ali Javaheri, an associate research analyst at PitchBook. It “shows that OpenAI is not the only player in the game, that it’s still a very competitive space,” he said.
Earlier this month, Anthropic was one of four companies invited to a meeting at the White House to discuss responsible AI development with Vice President Kamala Harris. Google parent Alphabet, Microsoft and OpenAI were the other tech names.
And in March, Anthropic announced that Claude would be available in Slack via a chatbot app. Early customers of Claude include Notion, DuckDuckGo and Quora.
The company declined to name additional customers besides Slack.
Sandy Banerjee, a representative for Anthropic, told CNBC the funding will be used “to continue training safer models, including future versions of Claude.”
“Our team is focused on AI alignment techniques that allow AI systems to better handle adversarial conversations, follow precise instructions and generally be more transparent about their behaviors and limitations,” Anthropic’s blog post said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gives a keynote address at CES 2025, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas on Jan. 6, 2025.
Steve Marcus | Reuters
Nvidia has lost nearly a third of its value just two months after notching a fresh high.
The leading chipmaker slumped about 5% on Monday, building on last week’s losses as heavy selling continued across the tech sector. The popular artificial intelligence stock has shed about a fifth of its market cap since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The stock hit an intraday high of $153.13 on Jan. 7.
Tariff fears and growth concerns have rocked technology stocks, including Nvidia, over the past week, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropping more than 4%. The Nasdaq traded at a six-month low on Monday.
Many technology companies rely on parts and manufacturing overseas and new levies could push up prices. That has also sparked worries of a U.S. recession, which Trump did not rule out over the weekend.
Tesla led the declines among the “Magnificent Seven” names, plummeting more than 13%. The Elon Musk-backed electric vehicle company has plunged 16% over the past week and shed nearly 44% since Trump took office in January. The stock is also coming off its longest weekly losing streak in history as a public company.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X experienced several outages on Monday morning, leaving some users unable to load the site.
Nearly 40,000 users reported problems with the platform around 10 a.m. ET, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users who spot glitches and report them to the service. Around 28,000 people were experiencing issues as of 11:30 a.m. ET.
When X resumed loading for users Monday afternoon, Musk said the company had suffered a “massive cyberattack.” Musk did not provide any evidence, and CNBC could not independently verify that a cyberattack took place.
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Musk acquired X, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022. The Tesla CEO slashed the company’s headcount by about 80% from 7,500 employees to 1,300 workers, and just 550 full-time engineers, by January 2023.
X has experienced several large-scale outages since Musk’s takeover. Users reported problems with the platform in December 2022 and with the site’s desktop app in July 2023, for instance.
The timing of the X outage couldn’t have been worse for NFL fans, who rely on the service for news updates. The first day of the NFL’s free agency tampering window began at 12 p.m. ET with the service down, sending fans searching for other options such as linear TV and Bluesky to get their news on player signings.
— CNBC’s Alex Sherman contributed reporting.
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Bitcoin dropped under the $80,000 level Monday, dragged by the continued selling pressure in the equities market.
The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last lower by 5% at $78,714.96, its lowest level since November, according to Coin Metrics.
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Bitcoin in the past day
Shares of companies linked to the crypto space also slid. Coinbase fell roughly 14%. Robinhood lost 17%, and bitcoin proxy play Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, declined 16%.
Bitcoin ETFs are coming off their fourth week in a row of outflows. They logged $867 million of outflows last week, bringing the four-week total to $4.75 billion, according to CoinShares. Continued bearishness pushed crypto prices even lower over the weekend, with bitcoin dropping sharply on Sunday evening to the $80,000 level for the first time since Feb. 28.
Absent a crypto-specific catalyst, macro concerns are likely to continue weighing on cryptocurrency prices in the near term. This week, the market will be watching for key economic indicators, including the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) Tuesday, the consumer price index on Wednesday and the producer price index slated for Thursday.
Although investors expect cryptocurrency prices are likely to pull back even more before making a run for a new record, their positive outlook on the year driven by regulatory tailwinds is still intact.
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