Anthropic has doubled the amount of VC funding it aims to raise, the FT reports, increasing the target from $10 billion to $20 billion. The round, expected to close soon, will give the company a valuation of $350 billion, sources told the FT. Anthropic, which makes the popular AI Claude and the equally popular Claude Code, decided to double its funding target due to booming investor interest.
The stock market is quickly waking up to the fact that is the leading AI software company today. It has overtaken and is less than $200 billion away from overtaking as the world's second-largest company. Overtaking the AI hardware leader, will take a bit more work, as it has a $755 billion lead over Google. Fortuitously for Google, that number is a drop in the bucket these days for Wall Street.
You could almost call it too much of a good thing. AI models have gone open source -- en masse -- to the tune of millions now competing for a place in our applications. There are echoes of the open sourcing of vital enterprise software and tools, with the opening of operating systems, databases, development platforms, and utilities at no cost. There is a difference this time, however. The AI world has virtually exploded into a mind-blowing array of models that handle everything from neural networks to risk-management tools.
Privacy-focused consumer tech company DuckDuckGo launched a subscription plan last year that bundled a VPN service, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration. The company said Thursday that the subscription now gives users access to the latest AI models through Duck.ai without paying extra. The Duck.ai chatbot is free to use, and users get access to models like Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Haiku, Meta's Llama 4 Scout, Mistral AI's Mistral Small 3 24B, and OpenAI's GPT-4o mini.
The premium plan called ChatGPT Plus guarantees access during blackout periods and includes access to OpenAI's most advanced models, making it attractive for superusers.
OpenAI's GPT-5 model marks a significant upgrade in coding and creative writing. However, it still lacks crucial elements needed for true AGI, including continuous learning.
According to Anthropic's commercial terms of service, customers are barred from using the service to 'build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models' or 'reverse engineer or duplicate' the services.
A group of anonymous Github contributors sued Open AI and Microsoft, claiming their LLMs generated new code snippets similar to theirs but stripped of copyright management information.