Anthropic, the AI safety startup founded in 2021, is reportedly in talks with venture capital firm Menlo Ventures to raise $750 million in a 2024 funding round. This huge amount of funding reflects Anthropic’s rapid growth and the increased interest in safe artificial intelligence approaches.
Introduction
Anthropic develops AI systems designed to be helpful, harmless, and honest. It was founded by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Chris Olah, Sam McCandlish, Jack Clarke, and Jared Kaplan in 2021. In its first round of funding in 2021, it raised $124 million, one of the largest Series A rounds ever. Anthropic’s AI technology, Constitutional AI, aims to create AI systems that behave safely.
Menlo Ventures is a venture capital firm headquartered in Silicon Valley. Founded in 1976, it has over $5 billion in assets under management. Menlo Ventures focuses its investments in consumer, enterprise, and life sciences companies. Some of its notable investments include Uber, DocuSign, Roku, Pinterest, and more. Menlo Ventures was looking for AI safety startups to invest in, leading to the talks with Anthropic.
The $750 Million Proposed Funding Round
The proposed $750 million funding round in 2024 would likely be a Series B or Series C round for Anthropic. Given the size of the proposed round, it would land amongst the largest private venture rounds in history.
It would also be the largest round ever for an AI safety company. Other major AI labs, like OpenAI and DeepMind, have already raised enormous investment rounds due to surging interest in artificial intelligence. Given Constitutional AI’s promise to deliver safe advanced AI, it is not surprising that Anthropic is attracting offers of massive funding from top venture firms.
The talks with Menlo Ventures indicate that this proposed $750 million may not be the final size of this round. Other investors will likely contribute to whatever size the eventual 2024 funding round reaches.
Anthropic’s regulatory filings do not yet show the $750 million being officially raised. But if the talks pan out as expected, official SEC filings will document the round in the future.
Funding Will Support Ongoing Growth
Although Anthropic has only existed since 2021, it has become one of the leading AI safety labs in the world. What is Constitutional AI, Anthropic’s approach to AI safety? Constitutional AI adds constraints to AI systems to make sure they respect human values.
Anthropic is led by some of the most influential researchers in the field, including Dario Amodei, one of the pioneers of modern AI. Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Chris Olah, Sam McCandlish, Jack Clarke, and Jared Kaplan complete the impressive founding team.
This $750 million in new funding would support Anthropic’s rapid scaling and growth of its team. So far, the company has focused on building out its technical AI capabilities and recruiting top AI researchers.
Presumably most of the new funding would go towards enlarging its engineering, research, and operations teams significantly. Hiring additional safety researchers and engineers will be critical for advancing its Constitutional AI methods.
Anthropic also intends to apply its AI safety methods to real-world problems like healthcare, sustainability, and more that will benefit customers. New funding will support expanding its commercial Constitutional AI products and services.
What Impact Could This Mega Round Have?
A $750 million investment into Anthropic’s Constitutional AI research and products could be truly transformative, both for the company and AI safety efforts broadly.
Here are some of the major impacts we could see:
- Propels Constitutional AI to the forefront of AI safety: This would provide Anthropic all the resources it needs to assemble a world-class safety team and conduct cutting-edge research. It positions Constitutional AI as a leading approach alongside techniques like self-supervision from DeepMind and OpenAI.
- Accelerates research timelines substantially: With far greater resources available, Anthropic could speed up its research and development of Constitutional AI methods enormously. Quicker research progress will translate into safer, more capable AI systems deployed into the real world sooner.
- Enables hiring hundreds of top researchers and engineers: Given its resources, prestige, and mission, Anthropic could have its pick of AI talent globally. It can hire potentially hundreds of researchers, engineers, product experts. This elite team assembled rapidly could make Constitutional AI products that transform entire industries.
- Applies AI safety at scale commercially: Beyond direct research, massive funding allows Constitutional AI products to rapidly develop across healthcare, science, finance, and more. Advanced AI capabilities with safety measures builtin can distribute widely into the business world through operational AI services.
- Sends message that AI safety vital: Such enormous funding devoted explicitly to making AI systems safer — not just more capable — makes a statement that safety is critical for realizing AI’s benefits. More investors may follow Menlo Ventures, pouring resources into safety areas.
Anthropic’s Future Plans
Anthropic intends to create AI assistants that are helpful, harmless, and honest. Key objectives are making AI systems more robust, avoiding negative behaviors, and minimizing deception or manipulation risks.
Constitutional AI enshrines these safety principles into the AI system via engineering and rules. It is like how constitutions and laws in human societies encode rights, checks and balances, representation, and justice mechanisms structurally.
To achieve its ambitious vision, Anthropic is assembling a world-class research lab, pursuing safety breakthroughs in areas like:
- Self-Supervised Learning: AI systems trained without human data on tasks encouraging general intelligence. This aligns with human preferences.
- Constitution Design: Developing the optimal abstract rules and mechanisms for encoding safe behaviors into AI systems.
- Stability & Reliability Engineering: Advancing techniques like testing, code quality, provable safety, and security that reduce accidents.
- Red Team: Carefully probing trained AI models for dangerous behaviors or potential failures requiring fixes.
Powered by its $750 million Series B super round, Anthropic intends to widely distribute its Constitutional AI commercially for business, healthcare, financial analysis, personalized education, and sustainability applications.
With rigorous safety measures built-in enabled by Constitutional AI, businesses can confidently and responsibly deploy advanced AI to solve problems. Ultimately this means AI will provide incredible value to society while respecting human preferences.
Menlo Venture’s Interest in AI Safety
For Menlo Ventures, its interest stems from the fact that artificial intelligence breakthroughs will drive the next decade of technological transformation. AI promises to disrupt every industry.
Yet most AI today lacks adequate safety measures against risks like hacks, data leaks, unfair bias, and accidents. As AI becomes more powerful, it is crucial that safety keeps pace. This means companies neglecting safety will fail.
Menlo Ventures previously invested in machine learning infrastructure tools via its investment in Transform. However, they came to realize that infrastructure alone is insufficient without safety protocols governing actual AI systems.
By leading Anthropic’s massive funding round, Menlo Ventures partners expect to make Constitutional AI the standard framework for industrial AI safety in the 2020s. They recognized Anthropic’s world-class team and approach makes it the ideal bet for leading the industry.
Given the runaway AI safety risks and dangers otherwise, Menlo Ventures considers Anthropic’s Constitutional AI pivotal for realizing AI’s monumental economic potential through safe products and services.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Anthropic being in talks with Menlo Ventures to raise an expected $750 million Series B investment in 2024 signals how promising yet critical AI safety efforts are right now. Anthropic requires enormous resources to scale Constitutional AI’s research and translation into widespread commercial solutions. But successfully making advanced AI technology safe as well opens up immense opportunities to apply its capabilities across healthcare, science, transportation, finance, and beyond. If the round reaches the rumored $750 million target, Anthropic will be propelled to the global forefront of making AI trustworthy via Constitutional safety constraints engineered directly into any system. Still, this mega funding round is about more than just Anthropic itself – it proves that Wall Street finally recognizes ethically aligning cutting-edge AI with human preferences as the single most important enabler for enjoying AI’s benefits across every industry in the years ahead.
