Anthropic nears $170 billion valuation with possible $5 billion raise
Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is reportedly closing in on a major funding deal that could raise between $3 billion and $5 billion, potentially tripling the company’s valuation to a staggering $170 billion. The news, first reported by Bloomberg, signals an aggressive new phase of growth for one of the leading developers of large language models.
The round is being led by Iconiq Capital, with sources indicating that a second lead investor may also join. Notably, the company has also been in discussions with sovereign wealth funds including Qatar Investment Authority and Singapore’s GIC, underscoring the growing global appetite for AI investments.
If finalized, this new investment would mark a dramatic leap from Anthropic’s last reported valuation of $61.5 billion, following a $3.5 billion round in March led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. That round attracted a broad mix of heavyweight investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, Fidelity, General Catalyst, and Salesforce Ventures.
Founded with a strong emphasis on AI safety and ethical development, Anthropic’s rapid rise has come with complex trade-offs. In a recent internal memo obtained by Wired, CEO Dario Amodei acknowledged the uneasy reality of accepting funding from authoritarian regimes, particularly in light of the company’s core values.
“Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” Amodei wrote in the memo, expressing discomfort with taking money from some sovereign wealth funds but conceding that the capital demands of building cutting-edge AI systems leave little room for idealism.
The tension reflects a broader dilemma facing high-growth AI firms: how to remain true to their ethical commitments while keeping pace with the enormous infrastructure costs of model training and deployment. With competitors like OpenAI and Google DeepMind also in a fierce race for dominance, the pressure to secure funding at scale has never been more intense.
If the deal closes as expected, it would position Anthropic as one of the most valuable AI companies in the world—second only to OpenAI and potentially rivaling even the largest public tech firms in terms of private market valuation. It also highlights how sovereign capital, once confined mostly to oil and real estate, is now playing a decisive role in shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
