By Milana Vinn
Feb 10 (Reuters) – Blackstone is increasing its investment in chatbot maker Claude Anthropic, raising its stake to around $1 billion at a valuation of around $350 billion, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
AI startups continue to attract significant funding from global investors, driven by expectations of rapid growth and widespread commercial adoption.
The world’s largest alternative asset manager is investing an additional $200 million as part of Anthropic’s ongoing funding round, the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is private.
The latest investment values the Amazon and Alphabet-backed startup at $350 billion, reflecting strong investor appetite for leading generative AI companies.
Blackstone and Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Anthropic, which develops the Claude family of AI models, last week launched a new flagship system called Opus 4.6, which steps up its efforts to provide more advanced tools to businesses and consumers.
The company said the new model offers improved reasoning, coding and complex text generation capabilities compared to previous versions.
Opus 4.6 is also designed to run on tasks for “longer periods and with greater reliability, while showing notable performance gains in areas such as software development and financial analysis,” the company said.
The release of the new model came just days before a selloff in traditional software stocks, after recent advances in artificial intelligence reignited concerns that AI could disrupt established business models in the industry.
Software stocks in Europe and the United States slumped last week after the launch, as investors grew increasingly wary that rapid improvements in generative AI could erode demand for conventional software products and services.
The software industry is widely seen as particularly vulnerable to disruption, as tools like Claude increasingly automate the routine tasks that have long underpinned the pricing power and revenue growth of many companies.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Milana Vinn in New York; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)