Anthropic raises $580M Series B

Anthropic closed a $580 million Series B, reported by TechCrunch and other outlets on 29 April 2022. The round was led by Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, whose trading firm Alameda Research supplied roughly $500 million of the total — the large majority of the round. Other participants included Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, both FTX-linked executives, along with Jaan Tallinn and the Center for Emerging Risk Research.

Co-founder Dario Amodei described the company’s research agenda as exploring “the predictable scaling properties of machine learning systems, while closely examining the unpredictable ways in which capabilities and safety issues can emerge at scale.” Anthropic said the funding would go toward team growth, the computational infrastructure needed for large-scale model research, and building out its policy and societal-impact work, alongside its core safety research.

The round drew little scrutiny at the time. That changed after FTX collapsed into bankruptcy that November, when it emerged that customer deposits — not Alameda’s own capital — had funded much of Bankman-Fried’s outside investing, Anthropic’s stake among them. The FTX bankruptcy estate subsequently held a claim tied to this investment as part of the effort to repay creditors, and Anthropic’s rising valuation in the years that followed made that stake a recurring subject of bankruptcy reporting. The episode became a standing reminder that even a research lab founded on caution about AI risk had, in its early capital, an exposure to risk of an entirely different kind.