Welcome to the podcast.
I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer.
Today on the show we're talking about Anthropic, who is in the final stages of raising 20 billion in new capital.
We'll talk about their valuation.
We'll talk about who's reporting on this and what they've done so far, who's putting money into it.
And of course they're getting into a little bit of legal trouble as they're expanding into India with some companies in India.
So we're going to get into all of the Anthropic news today.
Before we get into all of that, I wanted to mention, if you want to try, the latest models from Anthropic.
We just added Cloud Opus 46 the newest model from Anthropic to AIboxai, along with 40 other AI models.
So if you want to try 40 of the top models from Cohere, DeepSeat, Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, Quan, XAI, tons of interesting image and audio models, go check out AIbox.ai.
And in addition, if you've tried AIbox in the past for our no-code AI, AI app builder.
We've just upgraded it to be run by Claude Opus 4.6.
So it builds better tools.
It's really exciting.
Go check it out.
There's a link in the description.
We've also just added a 899 tier, so you can get access for less than 10 a month to over 40 of the top AI models all in one place.
So go check it out.
AIbox.ai.
I'll link it in the description.
Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Anthropic.
So I think right now we're seeing really strong investor demand.
They're raising $20 billion at a $350 billion valuation.
And this is all according to reports coming out of Bloomberg.
So investors really want to get in on this.
Obviously, I mean, Anthropic's a massive company doing some really impressive things.
But they have apparently pushed this round to double what its original target was.
They weren't trying to go after $20 billion, but they've been able to push it to that.
And this raise is coming just five months after Anthropic closed a 13 billion equity round, which I think I mean this is right on the heels of that.
I think this is showing just how much competition there is among a lot of these kind of top of the line AI models and these AI labs.
I mean, basically, they just need endless compute.
And so it just drives them to basically raise endless capital as quickly as possible.
So the people that are expected to participate in this round is Altimeter Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Coat Management, iconic capital.
And then apparently Singapore's sovereign wealth fund is also getting on this.
I think a lot of the funding however, is actually going to be coming from Anthropix, strategic partners, Nvidia and Microsoft.
So it's kind of interesting because I think you know, in a lot of cases you see companies typically a lot of these startups raising money from these big VCs and that's how they get their money to kind of go and grow.
But in the case of these AI labs, I mean, they just need endless money, basically.
And so it's interesting to see, like, they get the money.
Like, there's only a certain amount of people that can actually just give them these huge checks.
And NVIDIA apparently is one of those because they keep investing into every company.
And then as the companies grow and do bigger rounds well, NVIDIA is, you know.
NVIDIA is about the company is getting worth more.
And so they're able to, as a publicly traded company, raise more money, and more people are investing in them.
And so they just kind of basically circulate the money between NVIDIA and all these other AI firms, and Microsoft is kind of in a similar spot.
So I mean this is fascinating, but those are some of the only people that can really continue to sustain just dishing out unlimited amounts of money.
So all of the fundraising momentum right now, I think, is kind of building on a bunch of wins that Anthropic has had.
Their coding agent, Claude Code, is basically the you know, the bell of the ball for all software engineers.
It is the most popular tool.
And it also like I think, for good reason like we use it at AI Box to basically build everything we do.
And I would say we get about a 10x out of our engineers. using this to help with all of our coding.
So I think, while their latest models that they have recently put out are like they're really kind of focusing on legal and kind of like business research,
And when they put those tools out, they honestly, they basically shook the public markets.
We saw stocks collapsing from a lot of companies that work in those spaces because they're like, oh my gosh, maybe these companies are going to become irrelevant because Anthropic will just target those.
The other thing I'll say, though, is that their competitors are moving just as aggressively.
OpenAI is reportedly looking to do a $100 billion fundraising round of its own.
And both of these companies are like...
Basically everyone thinks that they're going to be trying to go after an IPO ahead of what is going to be a massive summer for the public markets.
XAI recently was acquired by SpaceX.
Those two companies merged.
They're also expected to IPO, as part of their shooting, data centers into space by SpaceX that are designed by XAI to power AI.
So, I mean, we're going to see some massive AI IPOs this summer.
I mean, assuming everything continues as planned for a lot of these companies.
But I think right now, Anthropic, they're really just trying to accelerate their global expansion.
They're rolling out new products.
They're hitting new markets.
I mean they ran a Super Bowl ad which, for you know, OpenAI had a ton of drama because Sam Altman, he got pretty upset about this Super Bowl ad.
That was saying that you know OpenAI was going to be putting ads in and Anthropic doesn't do that.
And so there's all this drama on X about that.
But right now, Anthropic is just is firing on all cylinders and pushing in any in every direction.
And part of their global expansion they've talked a lot about.
Is this move into India really focusing on India?
This is somewhere that OpenAI has seen a ton of growth and even Perplexity has seen a ton of growth.
So there's these different AI companies that have hit that market very hard.
And with such a huge population, I have seen a lot of success.
Now, what I will say for Anthropic is it feels like they've run into a bit of a snag in India.
So there apparently, is a local software company that has filed a court complaint alleging that it has operated under the name Anthropic since 2017, and they're arguing that, now that Anthropic is trying to come into the country, this is causing their customers to be confused.
And you know they're basically saying we want Anthropic to change its name so that you know our customers are not confused by it, which is an interesting problem, not just for India.
But I mean, you could imagine this could happen in other countries.
And it'd be interesting to see how these how these different firms react. fight that.
Now, in the case of something like ChatGPT, well, I mean, no one else was named ChatGPT.
This wasn't really something on top of people's minds.
But Anthropic, it's kind of a less straightforward name.
You could have imagined perhaps there's other companies around the world with this.
So I think the timing on this is important.
Anthropic, they've been really deepening their focus on India.
They announced some plans for an India office last last October.
And they also recently appointed the former Microsoft India managing director, who is arena ghosts, to lead their operations over there.
So obviously they're really signaling that the market is growing and that this is a really important market for them.
I think a lot of AI firms are trying to expand beyond just the US and Europe, right?
If they're trying to get the user base they want and they're willing to do, you know, cheaper tiers, as we've seen with OpenAI and kind of their Go plan.
And there's all these different strategies, but they basically want to capture the market in India so they can increase their users.
Similar to.
I don't know what we've seen big companies like Facebook do is they try to roll out more globally and just get more users?
So, In a complaint that was filed in a commercial court in Kartanska in January, the company Anthropic Software is trying to get recognition of its prior use of the name.
They want relief to prevent further confusion.
And they want about $110,000 in damages from Anthropic.
That's their claim. goal and i mean when you see anthropic pay out billions of dollars for falsely or for you know training their models on um on you know data that was stolen from pirated book sources they got to pay that out to the authors i feel like if this if they're really going to go all in anthropic software should probably go for more than 100 grand in damages for this considering it's you know making international headlines But one thing that I'll say is that the founder and the director, his name is Ahmed Ayaz Mullah, and he was doing an interview on this and he said that they're not trying to be confrontational, but they're just trying to basically have some clarity.
They're trying to add that the litigation is a fallback if the coexistence cannot be achieved.
I mean, it's kind of interesting.
At the end of the day, if I was him, I don't know what his software does or what they're trying to do.
But for 100 grand.
I think he probably, should you know, ask him for 5 million and probably just let him acquire his software company and close up shop.
I mean, perhaps he makes a lot more than that.
But I just feel like this is a is probably not a company that's going to be able to compete with Anthropic
And I'm not sure if Anthropic is going to just completely change the name of their, their company, for this.
India right now, I will say, is the most populated country in the world.
It is one of the fastest growing internet markets and has basically become the key battleground for all of the AI leaders.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, Google Gemini, they host an AI impact summit next week where Anthropic co-founder and their CEO, Dario Amadeo, he's going to be actually speaking there alongside Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Sandar Pichai.
So this is going to be interesting.
The court order date on this whole.
Anthropic you know suit is for January 20th, which basically shows that notice and suit summons have been issued to Anthropic but the court has declined to grant an interim injunction.
The case is scheduled to return on February 16th.
I mean, I'm not really holding my breath for what's going to happen there.
Anthropic, the one that you know.
The AI company has unlimited money and I'm pretty sure at the end of the day they'll just acquire the other company if necessary.
So it is kind of these speed bumps that you see in these global expansions.
But I mean considering Anthropic is in the process of a 20 billion new capital raise.
I think they will have enough capital to keep their name and continue their expansion globally.
Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast.
If you learned anything new or if you enjoyed the episode.
It'd mean the world to me if you could leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts on Apple, leave a comment.
Drop some stars.
Honestly, if you enjoy the episode, I make these for you.
I hope that they're helpful.
And yeah, I read all the comments.
I really appreciate all the reviews.
And on Spotify, it's the About tab.
But anyways, thanks so much for tuning in.
Make sure to check out AIbox.ai.
You can go check out our new 899 a month tier that gets you access to over 40 of the top AI models in one place.
It's amazing.
Hope this is really helpful.
I'll catch you guys all in the next episode.
