Google agrees to new $1 billion investment in Anthropic

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Google has agreed to a new investment of more than $1 billion in generative AI startup Anthropic, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC.
The fresh funding builds on Google’s past investments of $2 billion in Anthropic and 10% ownership stake in the startup, as well as a large cloud contract between the two companies. Anthropic is most well known for its Claude AI chatbot.
The agreement comes as Anthropic, one of the key players in Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence arms race, is in late-stage talks to raise a funding round of $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, CNBC reported earlier this month.
In December, Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $1 billion, which was an increase of roughly 10x year over year, the source said. The company’s revenue comes primarily from enterprise sales.
Financial Times was first to report Google’s investment.
Anthropic, which has been backed heavily by Amazon , was founded by former OpenAI research executives. It launched Claude in March 2023, and like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer service functions.
The generative AI market, which includes Anthropic and OpenAI as well as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Amazon and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s principal investor, are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as developing their own technologies.
Amazon announced that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic in November. That brought Amazon’s total investment in the startup to $8 billion. Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic confirmed to CNBC at the time, and does not have a board seat.
As part of that investment, Amazon Web Services became Anthropic’s