Anthropic’s Bold $3.5B Plan: Spend It All in a Year
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We have breaking news out of Anthropic. They have just raised a mammoth $3.5 billion for their AI startup. This is really interesting because this is coming on the back of a bunch of new updates that they've put out. And we've seen other big players raising these

gigantic rounds recently. So what is their valuation? Who's putting the money in? What are they going to do with it? We'll be answering all those questions on the podcast today. Before we get into it, I wanted to say if you've ever wanted to grow and scale your career or your business with AI, I have a school community where every single week I release exclusive videos

breaking down the exact tools, workflows, and ways I am using AI to grow and scale my business. It's called the AI Hustle School Community. And if you're interested, in the past I've had this at $100 a month. We have the price discounted to $19 a month. And if you lock in that price, it will never be reimbursed.

raised on you. We cover all the ways that we are growing and making money from side hustles and scaling businesses and exactly how you can do it too. So if that sounds interesting to you, check it out. The link is in the description. Let's get into the podcast, what Anthropic is doing. The first thing I wanted to say is who is giving them money. So this round has a $61.5 billion post-money valuation. That is absolutely enormous. And it's being led by Lightspeed Venture

venture partners. So top tier VC, we're seeing this trend. It's not like they're getting this from, you know, random people. This is big companies, big investment firms, all the top tier ones are putting the money in. So this is actually their series E and it's not obviously just Lightspeed Ventures. A ton of people are contributing to this. $3.5 billion is a ton of money.

So they're having Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, right? They're bringing all the top dogs. And really what I notice is when you have these deals that are, you know, $3.5 billion, for example, it's not going to be just for one person. You're going to have a ton of people coming

coming in. So total that they've raised is $18.2 billion. This is really big. And they've actually raised a lot of this in the past from Amazon. I want to read a quote of what they said, you know, their plan is with all of this. So they said, quote, with this investment, Anthropic will advance its development of next generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanic interpretation,

interpretability and alignment and accelerate its internal international expansion. So they said all this in a blog post they recently put out, and the international stuff is kind of interesting to me. They said, quote, Anthropica is focused on developing AI systems that can serve as true collaborators working alongside teams to tackle complex projects, synthesize information across fields, and help organizations...

achieve outsized impact. Okay. I mean, nothing too crazy. They don't really give you the exact blueprint. Obviously they're like, Hey, we're one of the biggest AI companies. We need more money to keep being one of the biggest AI companies. People are going to give them money in all of that. I mean, you know, they could be like, Oh, we're going international. We're going to focus on like the actual compute, like buying the chips and like, I don't know, making the next generation. They're already at the front. So they don't really have to say like, we're building this new crazy thing. No one's ever seen before. It's just like, they're like, look, we're leader. We need money to continue being a leader. That's kind of what I got out of it. So yeah,

What's interesting though is all of this is coming right on the back of them releasing Claude 3.7 Sonnet. This is pretty much their latest flagship model and I think it's a pretty good indicator that they're able to close this big round. That you know the reception wasn't like oh my gosh their new model's insane but it was like it's pretty good. People weren't disappointed. It didn't make it fall apart even though I did hear you know criticism for the model because it wasn't like

a huge leap forward. But we saw the same thing from OpenAI not feeling like their new model was like this insane leap forward. So I think this is interesting. One thing I will say that is interesting, and I will give Anthropic the flowers for in

In regards to this new Cloud 3.75 Sonnet, this is what is called a hybrid model. So essentially, it's a model that they say is a lot more careful when it considers your questions you ask it before it actually answers. It's part of their kind of big effort they're doing to simplify how users are using these AI tools. And the one thing that drives me absolutely crazy when I use ChatGPT is that there's like 10 different ChatGPT 0104 mini plus

a high, you know, O3 high. It's got like all of the ones with the different like, you know, canvas and like all the different things in there. And so I just think that there is way too much and way too many dropdowns to choose from. And I hate having to pick like when I ask a question, I'm like, should I use like the O1 model, the O3 model, the O4, like the 4O model? I'm like, ah, this is so stupid. Like this thing just needs to understand what I want to do and it can just pick for me. This is really where Anthropic

and this is what they're kind of focusing on. So they get rid of all of that, and they don't want you to have to think about it. They just want the AI model to do all the work, and that's what I think would be fantastic if OpenAI did, and hopefully GPT-5 is going to do that. That's what OpenAI keeps alluding to. Sam Altman has been making like...

you know, dropping hints that that's what GPT-5 is going to be able to do. Anthropic feels a little bit ahead of the curve on that. So I will give them some kudos to that. So how much money is Anthropic actually making? What is their business at? The company's annual revenue was about $1 billion last year, and the number has increased by 30% so far in 2025.

So they're bringing in a ton of money. You can imagine that close to $1.35 billion right now. That's the run rate or whatever they're projected to have made in the next 365 days. And a lot of this is coming from

their API service. They also have, you know, personal subscriptions to their cloud chatbot. I think they're probably making money from both of those. They're also spending an insane amount of money to develop their AI system. They told their investors that they expected to burn about $3 billion this year. So if you know, they're out there, and they just raised $3.5 billion, they're planning to spend all of that money this year alone. So

Obviously, they're really trying to focus on boosting their profitability. This is a big thing for them. They've shifted their focus because of this, I believe, from just like, I don't know, like trying to make their model better and better to like they've gone out and done some like more software adjacent things. They have a bunch of new tools and kind of subscription tiers. They have their computer using agents, which they're calling their desktop client, which

They also have a mobile application. They're also opening some offices in Europe, which is kind of important, especially when you're trying to get into the EU market with all of their rules and regulations. It's pretty tricky. They also have made a bunch of really high-profile hires. So they grabbed recently the co-founder of Instagram, Mike Krieger, and one of OpenAI's co-founders, Dirk Kingman, and an ex-OpenAI safety researcher, Jan Leek. So they've got a bunch of these...

big people in there. You have a bunch of big software plays. Like I really do think Anthropic is doing things the right way. There's obviously things I would criticize about their model. I wish it was better accessing the internet. One thing that they have done really well though, is they've strengthened their relationship with Amazon. So this has been a really big investor in their company. In addition to just like, obviously Amazon has all these resources with AWS and all of their compute. And they kind of had to find the next big player since opening. I was all tied up

with Microsoft. So Amazon seems like a no-brainer in my opinion. But, you know, Amazon has given them $4 billion, or at least they gave them an additional $4 billion back in November. And I think they gave them more before that. So like they've done a bunch of stuff. They're also helping to work with Anthropic to really optimize some custom AI chips

And there's one in particular, I believe they're building called Trainium. And this is essentially for model training workloads. Now, this is a win-win for Amazon and Anthropic. Anthropic's like, great, we want these custom chips to do what we need better. And it

And Amazon AWS is like, well, if your company crashes and burns, if you help us develop this tool, any AI company will want it. Or even if you don't crash and burn, they probably use them as kind of like the anchor client. And then they can bring in all the other players that want to use these kind of like optimized AI training model chips. So I think this is a really big win-win. They also recently teamed up Amazon and Anthropic to build Amazon's new upgraded Alexa virtual assistant, the new Alexa Plus that they have

announced, which is fantastic. And if you've seen reports out of Apple, it looks like the Siri isn't going to get like finished. Like Apple's like, yeah, we might not have a next gen Siri till 2027, which is absolutely in my like, in my opinion, irresponsibly ridiculous of a company just because Google has figured it out.

Alexa has figured out with Amazon and how has Apple not figured it out. And so I think that this is a really smart move, Anthropic making that partnership with Amazon is really smart move for Amazon because they're like, they're not going to get stuck in this, you know, voice assistant purgatory that Apple seems to have found themselves in. They're able to really jumpstart it, the new Alexa Plus. I haven't had my hands on with it yet because it's not out. But like, basically what they've demoed and what they've said it's able to do is really impressive and it

exceeded my personal expectations beyond just like, you know, you're talking to a little speaker that has chat GPT built into it. So really excited about that. For just a bit of context and background, Anthropic, for those that don't know, it was co-launched back in 2021. So their CEO, Dario Amadei, he used to be the VP of research over at OpenAI, and he had some disagreements over the roadmap, essentially, that OpenAI was

working on. So he brought a bunch of different ex-OpenAI employees over. They started Anthropic. And that includes OpenAI's former

policy lead, Jack Clark. In any case, really, Anthropic is trying to position themselves and show themselves as look, we're like more of a safety focused company than OpenAI or other AI companies. And so this is kind of what they like to focus on. But absolutely massive kudos to them on this $3.5 billion raise. They're going to do impressive things. I hope, you know, some of my like short list of things that I'm just like,

ah, I wish they did this or that better. And that's the thing, though. It's like not the end of the day when every AI company does things better or worse than another, because it does kind of carve out different niches. I know for one, all of the developers working on AI box swear by Anthropic is the model they use way more than, you know, OpenAI or even Grok or anything like that. And so they do have a really solid fan base there. And I think that the output

it is it's for a good reason like they'll show me demos they're like look we asked chat gpt to like make this web page it created like this hello world thing they asked anthropic and it's like this really modern like really modern design with like the frosted glass with the borders around it and stuff and it makes really incredible ui ux so i do think that they have a really some really solid use cases and a really solid fan base i'm excited to see what anthropic

does in the future with this $3.5 billion. I will keep you up to date on all of that. And as always, if you want to grow and scale your business or career with AI or AI tools, make sure to join the AI Hustle School community. I'll have a link in the description for that. If you enjoyed the podcast today and wouldn't mind leaving me a review, I'd really appreciate it. I love making these for you. Hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day.