Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is reportedly in advanced discussions to raise $2 billion, potentially valuing the company at $60 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Tuesday (Jan. 7). This valuation includes the funds anticipated from the round and significantly exceeds the company's previous $18 billion valuation in 2024, positioning Anthropic as the fifth-most valuable U. S. startup. Anthropic’s annual revenue recently hit $875 million. Similar surges in valuation have occurred across AI firms recently, as investor optimism about AI's potential to transform industries continues to rise, as reported by PYMNTS on Oct. 3. On Oct.

2, OpenAI announced a $6. 6 billion funding round, valuing it at $157 billion. The ChatGPT developer aims to use this investment to enhance AI research, grow its computational resources, and refine its problem-solving tools. Additionally, it was reported on Nov. 20 that xAI, an AI startup led by Elon Musk, raised $5 billion and increased its valuation to $50 billion, up from $24 billion in spring 2024. xAI plans to use the funds to add 100, 000 Nvidia chips for training AI models. Another AI startup, Perplexity AI, reportedly completed a $500 million funding round in December, tripling its valuation to $9 billion—an impressive increase from its $520 million valuation at the start of 2024. Anthropic’s investors include Amazon, which bolstered its investment with another $4 billion in November, following an initial $4 billion commitment in September 2023. Amazon announced on Nov. 22 that Anthropic’s Claude is widely used by millions of end users and thousands of enterprises, including startups and government entities, through Amazon Bedrock. "The response from Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers developing generative AI applications with Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable, " said AWS CEO Matt Garman in a press release.