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.”
Chinese startup DeepSeek, which caused shockwaves across markets this year, quietly released an upgraded version of its artificial intelligence reasoning model.
The company did not make an official announcement, but the upgrade of DeepSeek R1 was released on AI model repository Hugging Face.
DeepSeek rose to prominence this year after its free, open-source R1 reasoning model outperformed offerings from rivals including Meta and OpenAI. The low-cost and short time of development shocked global markets, sparking concerns that U.S. tech giants were overspending on infrastructure and wiping billions of dollars of value of major U.S. tech stocks like AI stalwart Nvidia. These companies have since broadly recovered.
Just as was the case with DeepSeek R1’s debut, the upgraded model was also released with little fanfare. It is a reasoning model, which means the AI can execute more complicated tasks through a step-by-step logical thought process.
The upgraded DeepSeek R1 model is just behind OpenAI’s o4-mini and o3 reasoning models on LiveCodeBench, a site that benchmarks models against different metrics.
DeepSeek has become the poster child of how Chinese artificial intelligence is still developing despite U.S. attempts to restrict the country’s access to chips and other technology. This month, Chinese technology giants Baidu and Tencent revealed how they were making their AI models more efficient to deal with U.S. semiconductor export curbs.
“The U.S. has based its policy on the assumption that China cannot make AI chips,” Huang said. “That assumption was always questionable, and now it’s clearly wrong.”
“The question is not whether China will have AI,” Huang added. “It already does.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk reacts while wearing a cap with the words “Gulf of America” as he attends a cabinet meeting held by U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
With his official stint in government coming to an end, Elon Musk thanked President Donald Trump on Wednesday for “the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.”
Since joining the second Trump administration at the beginning of the term in January, Musk has led the Department of Government Efficiency, tasked with slashing the size of the federal government.
As a so-called special government employee, Musk can work for the administration for 130 days in a calendar year. The end of May marks 130 days since Trump’s inauguration.
“The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government,” Musk wrote.
A White House official who was granted anonymity to describe personnel matters confirmed Musk’s departure and said he will begin offboarding Wednesday night.
Musk was critical of Trump’s spending bill that’s making its way through Congress, saying in a CBS interview set to air June 1 that it “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
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Musk, the world’s richest person, is CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and artificial intelligence startup xAI. Musk said this week that he plans to focus more on his businesses.
On a Tesla earnings call in April, Musk said that his time spent running DOGE would drop significantly by the end of May. On the same call, he said that he would still spend a “day or two per week” on government work until the end of Trump’s term.
Musk has also said he plans to keep his small office at the White House.
During his first 100 days working with the Trump administration, Musk said in an interview with Fox Digital News that he had worked in Washington, D.C. on his DOGE initiative “7 days a week, or close to 7 days a week.”
Legal risks are now building up for Musk with myriad cases filed in the U.S. alleging that he violated federal laws while leading DOGE.
On Wednesday, pension fund leaders sent a letter to Tesla’s board saying that they should require Musk to put in 40 hours per week, at a minimum, at the EV maker as a condition to attain any future CEO pay package.
Elon Musk interviews on CNBC from the Tesla Headquarters in Texas.
CNBC
Elon Musk needs to spend more time at Tesla as his electric vehicle company faces a “crisis,” according to a letter on Wednesday from a group of pension fund leaders who manage investments in the company.
“Tesla’s stock price volatility, declining sales, as well as disconcerting reports regarding the company’s human rights practices, and a plummeting global reputation are cause for serious concern,” the investors wrote in a letter to Robyn Denholm, the company’s board chair. “Moreover, many issues are linked to Mr. Musk’s actions outside of his role as Technoking and Chief Executive Officer at Tesla, including his high-profile role as an architect of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).”
The investors want the Tesla board to require Musk to work a minimum of 40 hours per week at the automaker as a condition of any new compensation plan they may arrange for him. They also want a clear succession plan for management of the EV business, and a policy that would apply to all Tesla directors limiting their outside board commitments at public and private companies.
Early last year, the Delaware Court of Chancery ordered Tesla to rescind Musk’s 2018 CEO pay package, which had been worth around $56 billion, finding that Musk controlled the company, and the board’s compensation committee misled shareholders before seeking their vote to approve the plan.
Musk now says he wants even more shares, amounting to 25% voting control of the company.
Tesla’s brand value and reputation have declined since 2024, due largely to Musk‘s incendiary rhetoric and political activities. In addition to pouring nearly $300 million into an effort to get Donald Trump back into the White House, Musk formally endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party ahead of the country’s parliamentary election this year.
At DOGE, Musk has led an initiative by the Trump administration to slash federal agencies.
Tesla once ranked eighth among the most popular American brands in the Axios Harris Poll of public perceptions of the 100 most visible U.S. companies. But recently, Tesla dropped to 95th, behind six other automakers in that poll.
Tesla’s stock price is down 12% this year, while the Nasdaq is down just 1%.
Data this week revealed that Tesla’s monthly sales across Europe plunged by nearly half in April compared to the same time last year. That trend extends the steep declines Tesla saw in the first quarter.
The investors who signed Wednesday’s letter own about 7.9 million shares in the company combined. They blamed a Tesla board that’s “unwilling to act in the best interest of all Tesla shareholders” by requiring Musk’s “full-time attention” on the company.
Musk said this week that he plans to focus more on his businesses, which include xAI and SpaceX in addition to Tesla.
Those who signed the letter included the pro-labor SOC Investment Group, American Federation of Teachers, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and Oregon State Treasurer Elizabeth Steiner.
The investors asked Tesla to add at least one new independent director with no personal ties to other board members. Tesla earlier this month said former Chipotle CFO Jack Hartung will join the company’s board. Hartung previously worked with Musk’s brother and Tesla board member Kimbal Musk, who was a board member at the Mexican food chain.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment in response to the letter.