Anthropic has raised $3.5 billion in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, valuing the AI startup at $61.5 billion.
Lightspeed is known for its investments in various AI companies such as Stability AI and AI music generator Suno.
Anthropic’s Series E round included participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, Anthropic announced Tuesday (March 4).
This brings Anthropic’s total funding to $18.2 billion, according to data from Crunchbase.
Amazon remains one of Anthropic’s largest backers. With its investment of an additional $4 billion last fall, Amazon’s total commitment to Anthropic has reached $8 billion. Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude, is being integrated into Amazon’s Alexa+, as part of a “routing system” designed to make the voice assistant respond faster and more accurately (according to Amazon) than current chatbots.
Tech behemoth Google is also an Anthropic backer, making a reported investment of more than $1 billion in January.
The funding follows the launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, an AI model that Anthropic says improves coding and reasoning capabilities. Businesses across industries, from startups like Cursor and Codeium to global firms such as Zoom, Snowflake, and Pfizer, are incorporating Claude into their operations to boost efficiency and automation, Anthropic said.
Amid its rapid growth, Open AI rival Anthropic is facing legal challenges. The company was sued last year by music publishers including Universal Music Publishing, Concord, and ABKCO, who allege that Anthropic’s AI was trained on copyrighted lyrics from at least 500 songs by major artists such as Katy Perry, the Rolling Stones, and Beyoncé. The publishers are seeking $150,000 per infringement in damages.
In January, the plaintiffs secured court-approved restrictions requiring Anthropic to implement safeguards in its AI models to prevent copyright violations.
Anthropic isn’t the only AI firm under legal scrutiny. AI music generator Suno, valued at $500 million, has also invested in Anthropic. Like Anthropic, Suno faces lawsuits from music industry players, including a recent copyright infringement case brought by German licensing body GEMA. The company and fellow AI startup Udio were sued last year by major record labels for allegedly using copyrighted recordings without permission. Both Suno and Udio have admitted to training their models on copyrighted material, but argue this is “fair use” under US copyright law.
Anthropic says its latest investment round will support its development of advanced AI systems, expand its compute infrastructure, and accelerate its global push.
The company has expanded its global footprint, opening offices in Europe and hiring key executives, including Instagram co-founder Mike Kriege, OpenAI co-founder Durk Kingma, and former OpenAI safety researcher Jan Leike.
“Continuing this trajectory, Anthropic remains focused on deepening our understanding of frontier AI systems and ensuring that artificial intelligence advances human progress,” the company said.Music Business Worldwide
