Anthropic on Monday closed its latest funding round at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed to CNBC.

The $3.5 billion round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and other investors included Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners and Jane Street, among others.

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup backed heavily by Amazon, was founded by former OpenAI research executives. It launched Claude in March 2023, and like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer service functions.

The startup plans to use the latest funding to advance its development of next-generation AI, particularly to “expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion in Asia and Europe,” according to a release.

In December, Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $1 billion, which was an increase of roughly 10x year over year, a source told CNBC at the time. The company’s revenue comes primarily from enterprise sales, and its clients currently include startups like Cursor, Codeium and Replit, as well as larger businesses like Zoom, Snowflake, Pfizer, Thomson Reuters and Novo Nordisk, the company behind Ozempic, according to a release.

Anthropic also spotlighted in its release about the funding round that its technology now fuels Amazon’s Alexa+, “bringing Claude to millions of households and Prime members.”

Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO, said in a release that the latest investment “fuels our development of more intelligent and capable AI systems that expand what humans can achieve” and that “continued advances in scaling across all aspects of model training are powering breakthroughs in intelligence and expertise.”

News of the latest funding round after Google in January agreed to a new investment of more than $1 billion in Anthropic, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC at the time. The fresh funding built on Google’s past investments of $2 billion in Anthropic and 10% ownership stake in the startup, as well as a large cloud contract between the two companies. Anthropic is most well known for its Claude AI chatbot.

The generative AI market, which includes Anthropic and OpenAI as well as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Amazon and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s principal investor, are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as developing their own technologies.

Amazon announced that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic in November. That brought Amazon’s total investment in the startup to $8 billion. Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic confirmed to CNBC at the time, and does not have a board seat.

As part of the November investment, Amazon Web Services became Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner.” Anthropic has used Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models since then.

Anthropic ramped up its technology development throughout last year, and in October, the startup said that its AI agents were able to use computers like humans can to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing, the startup said.

BARCELONA — Chinese smartphone firm Oppo is taking a page out of Apple’s playbook with the launch of a private cloud computing system to keep users’ sensitive conversations separate from its own artificial intelligence products.

The company on Monday announced a deal with Google that will see it use the U.S. tech firm’s Confidential Computing software, which uses encryption to ensure user data can’t be viewed by third parties, to power a new privacy-preserving solution it’s calling Private Computing Cloud.

The idea is to make sure that users’ sensitive data such as browser searches and private calls can’t be shared with Oppo for the purposes of training its AI software. Oppo already has a partnership in place with Google, where the firm uses the internet search giant’s Gemini foundation models to power its AI features.

The privacy push mimics an effort from Apple to protect user data from its own AI system, Apple Intelligence. The iPhone maker last year debuted Private Cloud Compute, or PCC, a “cloud intelligence system designed specifically for private AI processing.”

Oppo said that its Private Computing Cloud system will be integrated with several features this year, including recording and call summarization, search and image generation.

Oppo is the sixth-largest smartphone maker in China, according to Counterpoint Research, holding a 14% market share in the three months ending 2024.

“With AI being a lightning conductor for privacy concerns, particularly amongst Chinese device makers, this is an interesting move by Oppo as it seeks to gain a foothold in the AI-enabled smartphone space,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at market research firm CCS Insight, told CNBC.

Rival Chinese smartphone maker Honor announced its own tie-up with Google over the weekend.

Alongside its new AI privacy system, Oppo also announced additional new AI features, including call translation and voice transcription. It’s also embedding Google’s Gemini into its Notes, Calendar and Clock apps.

Oppo said it’s working to bring Google’s next-generation Gemini 2.0 AI model to its phones soon. Gemini 2.0 is a so-called agentic AI system, which refers to a form of AI that can fulfill various actions autonomously on users’ behalf.

The company said it is aiming to bring generation AI features to 100 million users by the end of 2025, doubling its 2024 target of 50 million.