SAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligence developer Anthropic is exploring a private funding round ranging between $40 billion and $50 billion as it lays the groundwork for an initial public offering, according to people with direct knowledge of the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The startup, which builds and sells access to the Claude family of artificial intelligence models, is targeting a valuation between $850 billion and $900 billion, per the people familiar with the matter.
Corporate finance teams at Anthropic are treating the prospective transaction as the final major capital injection before listing shares on a public exchange, following early conversations held over the last several weeks.
Developing advanced machine learning systems demands enormous financial resources to pay hardware vendors for specialized silicon chips and rent data center capacity to compete directly against rivals like OpenAI and Google.
The ongoing discussions remain fluid, and no formal paperwork has been submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or other regulators while the timeline remains open.
