Challenging Microsoft, Google invests $300 million in AI startup Anthropic, with SBF having also invested $500 million.

According to the Financial Times, Google has invested $300 million in AI startup Anthropic, acquiring a 10% stake in the company.

Google has confirmed the news, stating that in addition to investing $300 million, it has also acquired a large amount of computing resources from the company's cloud computing department to improve the company's financial situation. However, Google has not disclosed further details.

Anthropic was founded in 2021, with founder and CEO Dario Amodei originally being a researcher at OpenAI. Due to disagreements in the company's development direction, he believed that Microsoft's initial investment three years ago would make OpenAI more commercialized, deviating from AI's security requirements, so he later left the team. To maintain independence, Anthropic has two classes of stocks, with one class having 10 times the voting rights, a design often used in startups to ensure long-term development is less influenced by external investors.

Before receiving investment from Google, Anthropic had raised over $700 million by the end of 2022, including $5 billion from SBF, the founder of the bankrupt exchange FTX. Currently, bankruptcy reorganization lawyers have marked this money as assets of creditors and can be recovered.

It is said that Anthropic has developed the Claude AI chatbot, which is comparable to OpenAI's ChatGPT, but the product has not been publicly released.

The market has likened this deal to Microsoft's investment in OpenAI. Anthropic and OpenAI are both AI startups that can write scripts and create art in a matter of seconds, andMicrosoft announced last month that it would invest billions more in OpenAI.

Although the strategic investment concepts are similar, insiders say that Microsoft is integrating OpenAI's technology into its own services, while Google's current collaboration with Anthropic is only as a "technology provider."