Anthropic expands to Europe and raises more money

After OpenAI announced the newest version of its large-language GPT model, its biggest rival in the sphere of generative artificial intelligence within the US announced the expansion of its own solution. Anthropic said Monday that Claude, its AI assistant, is now available in Europe and supports “multiple languages,” including French, German, Italian and Spanish in Claude.ai, an iOS app and marketing strategy for teams.

The launch comes as Anthropic expanded its API to Europe to encourage developers to use and integrate its models. Both are part of a bigger startup push to speed up growth. To date, Anthropic has raised nearly $8 billion at a valuation of $18.4 billion (post-cash), with over $7 billion raised last yr.

Co-founder and CEO Daniela Amodei confirmed to TechCrunch that Anthropic is within the strategy of raising additional seed capital. “Yes, but we cannot comment further,” she said of the fundraiser in an emailed interview.

Anthropic’s list of nearly 60 current investors strategically includes Amazon, Google, Salesforce, SAP and Zoom. Alameda and FTX recently announced plans to sell their former shares at an increased value of $884 million in a secondary transaction related to the bankruptcy proceedings.

Anthropic is not the only company benefiting from investor appetite for backing AI startups. We know from sources close to Mistral AI, one other LLM player, that it’s in talks with investors to raise almost $600 million at a valuation of $6 billion. In particular, Softbank will not be an investor in any of those corporations, which places it amongst potential sponsors.

Investors are currently very keen about generative AI, but perhaps consumers are a bit less enthusiastic. As we reported last week, the Anthropic iOS app, launched in early May, has been met with lukewarm reception from users to this point, underscoring larger questions on how much of the interest in artificial intelligence we’re currently seeing is only a passing fad. This may pose a challenge as the corporate looks for further business opportunities overseas.

Amodei believes that bringing its own iOS to the OpenAI marketplace will not be a simple comparison, provided that Anthropic focuses totally on work and enterprise apps, in addition to more “seamless” experiences that carry over from personal accounts for work and switch between different interfaces and platforms, and this implies it can have been a stroke of luck for a bigger rival.

“ChatGPT for mobile devices came out at a time when these types of consumer apps were still very young, and a lot has changed since then,” she said. She added that “millions” of consumers within the US and UK use Claude “and we continue to see very strong adoption of our paid Claude subscription (Claude Pro) since the launch of Claude 3” – the corporate’s latest model, launched earlier on this yr.

“Our principal focus is on work and enterprise applications – and our recent software launch Claude’s team plan indicates a unbroken trend in our country. We want our users to interact with Claude in the way in which that feels most intuitive to them – via mobile, web or API. We’re aiming for a reasonably seamless experience where Claude users can switch between personal and work accounts and switch between laptop and mobile in the identical way that employees use Slack on their laptops through the workday or on their phones once they are on the way in which.”

Daniela Amodei declined to provide specific figures on API usage in Europe, but said it was seeing “soaring growth rates that continue to increase in key European markets such as France and Germany.” Arousing the interest of users across Europe is just certainly one of the challenges the corporate faces on this market.

Europe has been certainly one of the loudest voices on AI security and regulation, especially after the passing of the Artificial Intelligence Act earlier this yr. Amodei believes that Anthropic is well placed to operate inside a European framework.

“Anthropic was founded on the premise of building the most secure AI systems in the industry and at the forefront of pioneering AI security research,” she said, adding that the corporate is working “diligently” to comply with regulations similar to GDPR within the EU. She added that there continues to be much work to be done on how the Artificial Intelligence Act can be implemented.

“While the Artificial Intelligence Act has been approved, there are still many steps left to develop detailed guidance on its implementation in the coming months, and we intend to work with the EU in this process.” She added that the corporate continues to work and contribute to industry efforts to improve AI security, including banning using its technology for political campaigns and lobbying, with built-in automated systems to detect related breaches and disinformation.

Her work on mechanistic interpretation – which she described as “research aimed at opening the ‘black box’ of AI models and revealing their inner workings” – produced a breakthrough within the 2023 breakthrough around “dictionary learning” to understand what is going on contained in the AI ​​model when it’s “thinking,” she said. “We hope to ultimately use this newfound knowledge to develop methods to guide models toward safer behaviors.”

Anthropic currently employs 40 people in its London office and several contractors from European countries, Amodei said, and is preparing to hire more, particularly for the development of the brand new office in Dublin.