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Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, is set to raise $3.5 billion in its latest funding round, pushing its valuation to $61.5 billion.
Initially aiming for $2 billion, the company has now secured greater backing from investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX.
This latest investment will bring Anthropic’s total funding to approximately $18 billion.
Even with its growing revenue, which now stands at around $1.2 billion annually, Anthropic is not yet profitable. The company plans to use the funds to further its AI research and development efforts, particularly in creating more advanced models.
Anthropic has also launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a new AI model that allows users to choose between instant responses and deeper, more complex reasoning. Unlike traditional AI chatbots that force users to pick between models with varying capabilities, Claude 3.7 Sonnet integrates both functionalities in a single system.
According to Anthropic, the model’s unique feature is its ability to “think” for as long as needed. This approach is just like human reasoning, where some questions require quick answers while others demand more thoughtful consideration.
“Similar to how humans don’t have two separate brains for questions that can be answered immediately versus those that require thought,” the company stated in a blog post, “we regard reasoning as simply one of the capabilities a frontier model should have, to be smoothly integrated with other capabilities, rather than something to be provided in a separate model.”
Pricing and Performance
The Claude 3.7 Sonnet model is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, making it more expensive than some competitors, such as OpenAI’s o3-mini and DeepSeek’s R1. However, Anthropic says that its hybrid nature—combining standard chatbot functions with deep reasoning—justifies the cost.
Performance tests show Claude 3.7 Sonnet surpassing previous versions. On SWE-Bench, a benchmark for real-world coding tasks, it achieved an accuracy of 62.3%, outperforming OpenAI’s o3-mini model, which scored 49.3%.
Another test, TAU-Bench, measured AI interaction with users in a simulated retail environment, where Claude 3.7 Sonnet scored 81.2%, ahead of OpenAI’s o1 model at 73.5%.
Again, Anthropic claims to have greatly improved the model’s ability to distinguish between harmful and harmless prompts, reducing unnecessary refusals by 45% compared to its predecessor, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Alongside Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic is launching a research preview of Claude Code, an AI-powered coding assistant. This tool allows developers to execute tasks directly from their terminal, such as modifying codebases, debugging errors, and even pushing updates to GitHub.
Illustrating its abilities, an Anthropic representative showed how Claude Code could break down a project’s structure and suggest improvements using plain English commands. Initially, access to Claude Code will be limited and granted on a first-come, first-served basis.
While Anthropic has taken a measured, safety-focused approach in the past, this launch seems to be a more aggressive innovation. However, OpenAI is reportedly preparing to release its own hybrid AI model in the coming months, bringing even fiercer competition in the space.
English (US) ·