Anthropic, a competitor to OpenAI, is in discussions to secure $750 million in funding at a valuation of $18.4 billion.

• According to a source with direct knowledge, Menlo Ventures is leading a $750 million funding round for Anthropic, an OpenAI rival founded by ex-OpenAI employees.
• The valuation of Anthropic has increased to up to $18.4 billion, according to the source, which is nearly 4.5 times the startup's earlier valuation of $4.1 billion this year.
• In April and May, Anthropic raised a combined $750 million from funding rounds, and in October, Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion in the startup over time.

According to a source with direct knowledge, Menlo Ventures is leading a $750 million funding round for Anthropic, an OpenAI rival founded by ex-OpenAI employees.

The valuation of Anthropic has increased to up to $18.4 billion, according to the source, which is nearly 4.5 times the startup's earlier valuation of $4.1 billion this year.

The Information previously reported on the fundraise, but Anthropic declined to comment on the story.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 and funded by companies such as Google, Salesforce, and Zoom, raised a combined $750 million from two funding rounds in April and May, with Google taking a 10% stake in the company. This May fundraise marked the largest artificial intelligence company funding round since Microsoft's investment in OpenAI in January, according to PitchBook data.

In October, Google committed to investing up to $2 billion in the startup, with a $500 million upfront cash infusion and an additional $1.5 billion to be invested over time.

Claude 2, developed by Anthropic, is a chatbot that competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT. It is used by companies such as -owned Slack, Notion, and Quora. Claude 2 has the capability to summarize up to 75,000 words, which is the length of a book. Users can input large data sets and request summaries in the form of a memo, letter, or story. In contrast, ChatGPT can handle about 3,000 words.

Dario Amodei, OpenAI's former vice president of research, and his sister, Daniela Amodei, who was OpenAI's vice president of safety and policy, founded Anthropic. Additionally, several other OpenAI research alumni were part of Anthropic's founding team.

A study by Arthur AI, a machine learning monitoring platform, evaluated chatbots from Anthropic, Meta, Cohere, and OpenAI, and determined that Claude 2 was the most dependable chatbot in terms of "self-awareness," meaning it accurately assessed its own abilities and only responded to questions it had been trained to answer.

In July, Daniela Amodei of Anthropic revealed to CNBC that the company invested at least two months in creating its latest chatbot, with a team of 30 to 35 individuals directly involved in developing the AI model and a total of 150 people supporting it. She stated that the market is expanding so quickly that there is ample space for numerous competitors to thrive.