OpenAI’s three biggest backers place collective bets against each other; Anthropic’s $30 billion funding deal will be settled this month.

AIMPACT news, May 15 (UTC+8), according to Beating monitoring, the terms of Anthropic’s new $300 billion funding round have been finalized. The pre-deal valuation is $900 billion, and the deal is expected to be completed within this month. The lead-investor lineup is the most noteworthy aspect of this round of financing.

Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, and Altimeter Capital are co-leading the round; each is investing at least $2 billion. Among them, three are also major shareholders in OpenAI: Dragoneer invested nearly $3 billion in OpenAI last year; Sequoia has been backing ChatGPT since 2021; and Altimeter CEO Brad Gerstner has repeatedly voiced support for Sam Altman in podcasts and interviews. Now, they are writing large checks for competitors whose valuations are about to overtake OpenAI at the same time—effectively signaling with real money that AI is a duopoly rather than a winner-takes-all landscape.

This funding round is coming very quickly. The operator is Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s first CFO, who joined in May 2024. His most well-known prior battle was brokering, at the front lines when the COVID-19 outbreak began in 2020, a $1 billion emergency lifeline for Airbnb. After investors proactively approached him last month, he launched negotiations and locked in the terms within two weeks. Google and Amazon are expected not to participate in this round. Anthropic is still negotiating the remaining shares with other investors, and the final terms may still be adjusted before the announcement.

(Source: BlockBeats)