February 10 (Reuters) – black stone increases its investment in chatbot creator Claude Anthropicraising its stake to about $1 billion at a valuation of about $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 in 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– startup backed at $350 billion, reflecting investors’ strong appetite for leaders Generative AI businesses.
Blackstone and Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Anthropic, which develops the Claude family of AI modelslaunched a new flagship system called Opus 4.6 last week, as part of its efforts to provide more advanced tools to businesses and individuals.
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 longer tasks 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, following recent advances in the software sector. artificial intelligence has reignited concerns that AI could disrupt established business models across the industry.
Software stocks in Europe and the United States fell 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)
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