After OpenAI announced the newest version of its large GPT language model, its biggest competitor within the US generative AI space announced its own expansion. Anthropocene announced Monday that Claude, its AI assistant, is now available in Europe and supports “multiple languages,” including French, German, Italian and Spanish in Claude.ai, its iOS app and its marketing strategy for Teams.
The launch comes after Anthropic expanded its API to Europe to enable developers to make use of and integrate its models. Both are part of a bigger push by the startup to drive faster growth. Anthropic has raised nearly $8 billion to this point at a valuation of $18.4 billion (post-money), with greater than $7 billion of that total raised last 12 months.
Co-founder and President Daniela Amodei confirmed to TechCrunch that Anthropic can also be within the technique of raising more primary capital. “Yes, but we cannot comment further,” she said of the fundraiser in an emailed interview.
Anthropic's list of nearly 60 current investors includes strategic corporations Amazon, Google, Salesforce, SAP and Zoom. Alameda and FTX recently announced plans to sell their existing shares at an increased value of $884 million in a secondary transaction related to bankruptcy proceedings.
Anthropic isn't the one company benefiting from strong investor interest in backing AI startups. From sources near Mistral AI, one other LLM player, we learn that the corporate is talking to investors to lift nearly $600 million at a valuation of $6 billion. Notably, SoftBank is just not an investor in any of those corporations and is due to this fact being regarded as a possible backer.
Investor enthusiasm for generative AI is currently very high, but consumers could also be a little bit less enthusiastic. As we reported last week, Anthropic's iOS app, which launched in early May, has received a lukewarm reception from users to this point, underscoring the larger query of how much of the interest we're currently seeing in AI is only a fad. That may very well be a challenge as the corporate looks for more business across the pond.
Amodei believes that its own iOS launch with OpenAI's is just not a direct comparison, as Anthropic is primarily focused on work and enterprise applications, with an emphasis on more “fluid” experiences that move from personal to work accounts and between different ones Switching interfaces and platforms What she suggests could have been luck in timing for the larger rival.
“ChatGPT for mobile got here at a time when consumer applications of this sort were of their infancy and lots has modified since then,” she said. She added that “hundreds of thousands” of consumers within the US and UK use Claude, “and we proceed to see very strong adoption of our paid subscription to Claude (Claude Pro) because the launch of Claude 3,” the corporate's latest model earlier this 12 months.
“Our primary focus is figure and enterprise applications – and the recent launch of Claude team plan For us, it is a sign of a unbroken trend. We want our users to interact with Claude in the way in which that’s most intuitive for them – be it mobile, web, or API. We're working on a comparatively fluid experience where Claude users can switch between their personal accounts and work accounts, and switch between laptop and mobile device in the identical way that employees interact with Slack throughout the workday on their laptops or on their phones on the way in which.”
Amodei declined to supply specific figures on the API's penetration in Europe, but said there are “steep growth rates that proceed to rise in key European markets comparable to France and Germany.” Stimulating the interest of users across Europe is just certainly one of the corporate's challenges on this market.
Europe has been certainly one of the loudest voices on the subject of AI safety and regulation, particularly with the AI law passed earlier this 12 months. Amodei believes Anthropic is well positioned to operate inside a European framework.
“Anthropic was founded on the premise of developing the safest AI systems within the industry and leading the way in which in AI security research,” she said, adding that the corporate is working “diligently” to deal with regulations like GDPR within the to comply with the EU. She added that there are further questions on the implementation of the AI law.
“Although the AI Law has been passed, some steps still have to be taken to develop detailed guidelines for implementation in the approaching months and we intend to work with the EU on this process.” She added that the corporate continues is working on and contributing to the industry's efforts to enhance AI security, including banning using its technology for political campaigns and lobbying, with integrated automated systems to detect related breaches and misinformation.
His work on mechanistic interpretability – which she described as “research geared toward opening the 'black box' of AI models and revealing their inner workings” – had a breakthrough in 2023 to “Dictionary learning“To understand what happens in an AI model while it 'thinks,'” she said. “Ultimately, we hope to make use of this newfound understanding to develop methods to steer models toward safer behaviors.”
Anthropic currently has 40 employees in its London office and a few contractors in European countries, Amodei said, and the corporate is preparing to rent more, particularly to construct a brand new business Dublin office.
