AI player Anthropic is reportedly in advanced discussions to raise $2 billion in a funding round that would value the company at $60 billion.

The Wall Street Journal reported Lightspeed Venture Partners is leading the investment round.

In November 2024, Amazon pumped another $4 billion into Anthropic to bring the tech giant’s total investment to $8 billion.

Anthropic launched AI assistant Claude in 2023 to compete with OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT product after being founded two years prior by former OpenAI executives.

It secured an upfront investment of $500 million from Google in 2023 which also included a plan to invest an additional $1.5 billion over time. Alphabet-owned Google has a ten per cent stake in the AI company.

Anthropic, Google and Microsoft are in an arms race to build out large data centres to train their large language models using Nvidia’s chips.