Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.’s Hottest Start-Ups
Summary
Dario Amodei, a founder and the chief executive of Anthropic.Credit...Massimo Berruti for The New York Times The company raised $7.3 billion over the last year, as the lure of artificial intelligence changes Silicon Valley deal-making. — which can generate text, images, sounds and video — burst onto the scene in late 2022, the rule book has been thrown out as investors have fought for a piece of the hottest developers. start-ups, including OpenAI, Character.AI and Cohere, have struck similar kinds of investment deals as they race to collect the most money, form the most lucrative partnerships, hire the best talent and get access to the most computer chips. Investors cannot afford to lose out on the action because “if you miss the winner in the space, you’re kind of out of the game,” said Ilya Strebulaev, a finance professor at Stanford. Menlo proposed leading Anthropic’s next round of funding, with a twist: What if the firm rolled all of the small investors into one special purpose vehicle?