AI Startups: Anthropic Nears OpenAI in Fundraises but Lags Far Behind in Adoption

Anthropic, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI engineers, is in talks to raise up to $2 billion for a valuation of $60 billion. The latest round would more than triple the artificial intelligence startup’s valuation from a year ago. Leading the round is Lightspeed Venture Partners.

If it comes to pass, the fundraise would make Anthropic the fifth most valuable U.S. startup, following SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe and Databricks, according to CB Insights. It would be the seventh most valuable globally after SpaceX, ByteDance, OpenAI, Stripe, Shein and Databricks.

The latest deal would bring Anthropic’s total haul since its 2021 founding to $16.7 billion, with Amazon pouring in $8 billion and at least $3 billion from Google, according to startup database Crunchbase. That compares with OpenAI’s total fundraise thus far of nearly $21.9 billion.

OpenAI has raised 31% more than Anthropic thus far. But if traffic to its AI chatbots is any indication of market popularity, OpenAI is attracting an order of magnitude more traffic — more bang per venture capital buck.

According to a research report from Bank of America Global Research, ChatGPT’s global traffic was 128 million in January while Anthropic’s Claude had 2.5 million. That is 51 times more traffic for ChatGPT than Claude while only raising 31% more funding.

When it comes to AI model adoption, OpenAI’s family of AI models is still heads above everyone else: 63% of organizations use OpenAI technologies in the cloud compared with 31% for Anthropic, according to report by cloud security company Wiz.

DeepSeek’s deeply discounted AI model is a new competitor in the AI landscape. According to Wiz, DeepSeek prompted a “surge” in adoption, with its newest model getting 130,000 downloads on Hugging Face, an open-source code repository.

For organizations not hosting their AI models in the cloud but on premises, about 7% are using DeepSeek models — more than doubling adoption just in January alone, according to the report.

OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is in talks to raise funding for his startup that would give it a valuation of $20 billion or more, according to Reuters. It is not clear how much capital his startup, Safe Superintelligence, will get.

Sutskever was one of the founding members of OpenAI. But he left in May 2024 following a corporate boardroom fight that led to the firing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in November 2023. Sutskever, a board member who oversaw AI safety, was the one who told Altman he was being removed.

The board cited Altman’s not being “consistently candid” as the reason for the firing. But after an outcry from investors and employees, Altman was reinstated. Sutskever would later resign. Another safety researcher, Jan Leike, quit shortly after. He said on X that he was concerned AI safety was taking a backset to innovation and growth at OpenAI.

Last September, Safe Superintelligence said it has raised $1 billion. Backers include NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, and SV Angel.

Sutskever’s latest fundraise stands in contrast to the startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, who resigned last September. She was in talks to raise $100 million, according to Reuters.

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