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Anthropic, the OpenAI rival founded by ex-OpenAI employees, is in talks to raise a $750 million funding round led by Menlo Ventures, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told CNBC.

The round would value Anthropic at up to $18.4 billion, per the source familiar — nearly 4.5x the startup’s $4.1 billion valuation earlier this year.

News of the fundraise was previously reported by The Information. Anthropic declined to offer a comment for this story.

Founded in 2021 and funded by companies including Google, Salesforce and Zoom, Anthropic had already raised a combined $750 million from two funding rounds in April and May — one of which involved Google taking a 10% stake in the company. Anthropic’s May fundraise marked, at the time, the largest AI company funding round since Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in January, according to PitchBook data.

In October, Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion in the startup — a commitment involving a $500 million upfront cash infusion and an additional $1.5 billion to be invested over time.

Anthropic is the developer of Claude 2, a rival chatbot to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that is used by companies including Salesforce-owned Slack, Notion and Quora. Claude 2 has the ability to summarize up to about 75,000 words, which could be the length of a book. Users can input large data sets and ask for summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. ChatGPT, by contrast, can handle about 3,000 words.

Anthropic 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.

Research by Arthur AI, a machine learning monitoring platform, tested chatbots from Anthropic, Meta, Cohere and OpenAI and found Claude 2 to be most reliable chatbot in terms of “self-awareness,” meaning accurately gauging what it does and doesn’t know, and answering only questions it had training data to support.

Daniela Amodei told CNBC in July that Anthropic invested at least two months in developing its newest chatbot, with a team of 30 to 35 people working directly on the AI model and a total of 150 people supporting it. She said the market is growing so rapidly that there’s plenty of room for multiple players to succeed.

“It’s a really unusual time from a business perspective because there’s just so much demand for large language models and really more demand than the industry can currently provide,” Amodei said at the time. “The landscape is just very wide, and there’s really quite a lot of room for many different users and types of users to make use of these systems.”

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SoftBank Group shares plunge over 9% as Asian tech stocks decline

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SoftBank Group shares plunge over 9% as Asian tech stocks decline

The logo of Japanese company SoftBank Group is seen outside the company’s headquarters in Tokyo on January 22, 2025. 

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Shares of SoftBank Group plunged as much as 9.17% Wednesday, as technology stocks in Asia declined, tracking losses in U.S. peers overnight.

The Japanese tech-focused investment firm saw shares drop for a second consecutive session, following its announcement of a $2 billion investment in Intel. Intel shares rose 6.97% to close at $25.31 Tuesday stateside.

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Other Japanese tech stocks also declined, with semiconductor giant Advantest falling as much as 6.27%. Meanwhile, shares in Renesas Electronics and Tokyo Electron were last seen trading 2.46% and 0.75% lower, respectively.

Technology companies in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, also fell after U.S. tech stocks dropped overnight spurred by declines in artificial intelligence darling Nvidia‘s shares.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is considering the federal government taking equity stakes in semiconductor companies that get funding under the CHIPS Act for building plants in the U.S, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The U.S. CHIPS and Science Act seeks to boost the country’s semiconductor industry, scientific research and innovation.

Shares of Taiwanese chip company TSMC and manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry — known globally as Foxconn — declined 1.69% and 2.16%, respectively. TSMC manufactures Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units that help power large language models, while Foxconn has a strategic partnership with Nvidia to build “AI factories.” 

Meanwhile, South Korean tech stocks mostly fell with shares of chipmaker SK Hynix down 3.33%. Samsung Electronics, however, rose 0.75%.

TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix are among companies that have received funding under the CHIPS Act.

Over in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng Tech index lost 0.87% in early trade.

The worst performing stocks on the index were Kuaishou Technology which declined 4.8%, JD Health International which dropped 3.31% and Horizon Robotics which lost 2.29%.

Losses were also seen tech majors Alibaba Group, down 1.44%, and Xiaomi Corp which lost 1.34%.

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Palantir stock slumps 9%, falling for a fifth straight day from record

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Palantir stock slumps 9%, falling for a fifth straight day from record

CEO of Palantir Technologies Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 15, 2025.

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Palantir‘s stock slumped more than 9% on Tuesday, falling for a fifth straight day to continue its pullback from all-time highs.

The artificial intelligence software provider’s stock has slid more than 15% over the last five trading sessions, after a stellar earnings report earlier this month propelled shares to all-time highs. The report was Palantir’s first-ever $1 billion revenue quarter.

Tuesday’s dip coincided with a broader market pullback.

Palantir is the most significant gainer to date in the S&P 500 in 2025, up more than 100%.

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Shares have more than doubled as the company benefits from ongoing AI enthusiasm, scooping up government contracts with President Donald Trump pushing to overhaul agencies.

Palantir’s ascent has pushed the company into a list of top 10 U.S. tech firms and 20 most valuable U.S. companies, while also making shares incredibly expensive to own. Its forward price-to-earnings ratio, which tracks future earnings relative to share price, has soared past 245 times.

By comparison, technology giants such as Microsoft and Apple carry a P/E of nearly 30 times and rake in significantly greater quarterly revenues. Meta‘s and Alphabet‘s P/E ratios hover in the 20s.

What to know about Palantir's engineer-led sales strategy

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Databricks says it’s valued at over $100 billion in latest funding round

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Databricks says it's valued at over 0 billion in latest funding round

Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks speaks on CNBC.

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Databricks has just entered an exclusive club.

The data analytics software vendor said Tuesday that it’s raising a funding round that values the company at over $100 billion. That would make Databricks just the fourth private company to eclipse the $100 billion mark, following SpaceX, ByteDance and OpenAI, according to data from CB Insights.

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan that the total round will exceed $1 billion. The company was last valued by private investors at $62 billion in a $10 billion financing round late last year.

In June, Databricks executives told investors the company was forecasting $3.7 billion in annualized revenue by July, with 50% year-over-year growth.

Snowflake, one of Databricks’ top rivals, is expected to generate $4.5 billion in revenue for the fiscal year that ends in January, representing annual growth of 25%, according to LSEG. Snowflake currently has a market cap of about $65 billion. Other competitors include cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft, which are also Databricks partners.

Ghodsi said he heard from a lot of interested investors following Figma’s IPO late last month. Shares of the design software company more than tripled in their New York Stock Exchange debut, a sign that public investors are seeking out tech offerings after in extended lull in the IPO market.

“My phone was blowing up,” Ghodsi said on Tuesday. “So yes, there’s definitely been a big push from outside.”

Figma shares have since retreated from their initial $115.50 closing price. The stock is trading at about $70, still more than double the $33 IPO price.

Ghodsi said the round will help Databricks invest in products that clients can tap when using artificial intelligence models.

Founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, Databricks ranked third on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list. As of June, the company employed 8,000 people. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners Thrive Capital and WCM Investment Management are buying shares, a spokesperson said.

WATCH: Databricks CEO on AI: VCs are wondering if agentic AI will actually automate work

Databricks CEO on AI: VCs are wondering if agentic AI will actually automate work

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