Microsoft might soon invest in Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude models, according to Dylan Patel, founder and chief analyst at SemiAnalysis. In a post on X, he predicted that the new funding round would increase the company’s valuation to $59 billion.
“Microsoft wants to have Claude in their pocket to push back against OpenAI, which is increasingly rambunctious with Microsoft,” Patel said.
Microsoft might be investing in Anthropic's new round at $59B.
— Dylan Patel (@dylan522p) December 18, 2024
Microsoft wants to have Claude in their pocket to push back against OpenAI who is increasingly rambunctious with Microsoft.
Very uncomfortable partnership between the two.
Anthropic, currently valued at $18.4 billion, raised $4 billion in funding in November via a round led by Amazon. Given the recent inflow of funding, it seems unlikely that the company will raise another round of funds in the near future.
An email sent to Anthropic did not elicit any response.
That said, Patel earlier revealed in his blog that Anthropic had finished training Claude 3.5 Opus and that it had “performed well and scaled appropriately”. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also revealed earlier that the company has plans to release its flagship model, the Claude Opus 3.5, soon.
For one, Microsoft is certainly interested in what Anthropic is doing. At the recent GitHub Universe 2024 event, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model was integrated into the coding assistant GitHub Copilot. GitHub also announced that it is making GitHub Copilot available for free within Visual Studio Code (VS Code).
If true, this could shake up the AI ecosystem, given that Microsoft has had a close relationship with OpenAI and has also invested over $13 billion in it to date.
If this move materialises, will this add to the fears that Microsoft is eating up the AI market? In November, Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, expanded a lawsuit against OpenAI by including Microsoft. Musk claimed they were engaging in anti-competitive and monopolistic practices in the AI ecosystem.
Even Google has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to purge Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. The report suggests that companies that buy OpenAI’s technology may have to pay an additional cost if they do not use Microsoft’s servers to run it.
Clearly, the big tech companies do not like the partnership. Moreover, OpenAI may also remove a clause from its agreement with Microsoft that disables its access to OpenAI’s advanced models when they reach AGI. This clause was included to prevent a large corporation like Microsoft from gaining access to powerful AI systems and prevent any misuse through commercial applications.
Moreover, when OpenAI completed its latest $6.6 billion funding round, it was reported that it requested investors not to pour capital into competing startups. Anthropic was one among the names, and, clearly, investors haven’t abided by OpenAI’s wishes.
In a 29-minute-long interview with CNBC, CFO Sarah Friar addressed the stipulations attached to the investment. “First and foremost, we want to make sure the ecosystem continues to develop…In terms of this round, we want to make sure investors are really focused on OpenAI, and of course, they are going to go out there and invest in the (AI) ecosystem. And this round is no different to any other round in that regard,” she said.
Moreover, UK-based industry analyst firm CCS Insight predicted that within three years, OpenAI will find it so difficult to raise funds that it will need to sell to Microsoft.
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