AI research startup Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch.
A pitch deck for Anthropic’s Series C fundraising round discloses these and other long-term goals for the company, which was founded in 2020 by former OpenAI researchers.
In the deck, Anthropic says that it plans to build a “frontier model” — tentatively called “Claude-Next” — 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI, but that this will require a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months.
Dario Amodei, the former VP of research at OpenAI, launched Anthropic in 2021 as a public benefit corporation, taking with him a number of OpenAI employees, including OpenAI’s former policy lead Jack Clark. Amodei split from OpenAI after a disagreement over the company’s direction, namely the startup’s increasingly commercial focus.
“These models could begin to automate large portions of the economy,” the pitch deck reads. “We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles.”
Anthropic released Claude commercially in March following a closed beta late last year, allowing around 15 partners initial access. It counts among its beta users and potential customers the following industries (with the asterisk indicating that a human is in the loop to supervise the model):
- Legal document summary and analysis*
- Medical patient records and analysis*
- Customer service emails and chat
- Coding models for consumers and B2B
- Productivity-related search, document editing and content generation*
- Chatbot for public Q&A and advice
- Search employing natural language responses
- HR tasks like job descriptions and interview analysis*
- Therapy and coaching
- Virtual assistants*
- Education at all levels*
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