Google Gives Anthropic A $1B Boost

Google gave AI startup Anthropic a $1 billion commitment to advance its technology, as the focus increasingly turns toward artificial intelligence under the new U.S. administration.

The latest investment from the Alphabet company adds to the previous $2 billion funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the Financial Times reported, citing four people with knowledge of the situation. 

The collaboration between Google and Anthropic underscores the need for partnerships to drive the future of AI. 

Anthropic, best known for its Claude family of AI models, has emerged as a major competitor to OpenAI, with other established companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) pouring funds into the startup. Amazon's investment has been $8 billion.

The additional investment from Google is not surprising. The search company built the technology on which models such as Claude were built.

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The Anthropic investment is part of Google trying to jump into a technology trend that will only accelerate this year as a new U.S. administration comes in with a focus on deregulating and shaking things up.

Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $1bn in December, according to an estimate by the Financial Times.

Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei told The Wall Street Journal that his "AI startup is racing to secure the computing power needed to meet demand for its generative AI chatbot Claude."

Amodei estimates his company will have more than 1 million chips powering its AI technology in 2026. He also teased the release of smarter models in the coming months, and noted that web integration is coming very soon.

The company is also working on a two-way voice mode and a better memory, to enable Claude to remember more about users and past conversations.

Amodei told the WSJ said he believes the technology would surpass human intelligence in the next two or three years.

“The positive consequences are going to be great,” he said. “The negative consequences we also will have to watch out for. I think progress really is as fast as people think it is.”

How much of that technology is available to Google and Amazon is unknown.

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