According to sources, months after receiving $4 billion in funding from Amazon, AI startup Anthropic is close to reaching an agreement to raise an additional $2 billion, which would value the company at $60 billion.

The sources, who wished to remain anonymous in order to discuss private matters, state that Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture capital firm, is spearheading the funding round.

The $6 billion in total funding will result in an increase in Anthropic's valuation. Anthropic is a significant rival of OpenAI in the foundation model market.

In a fundraising effort headed by Menlo Ventures last year, Anthropic was valued at approximately $18 billion.

Late last year, as the e-commerce behemoth competed with rival Big Tech companies to profit from generative AI technology, Amazon doubled its investment in the startup to $8 billion. Through this round, the most recent $4 billion in convertible notes issued to Amazon will be turned into equity.

Anthropic offers access to its models both directly and through third-party cloud services like Amazon Web Services. Its annualized revenue was approximately $875 million. Top talent and costly computing power are needed to develop large language models.

Anthropic, a San Francisco-based company Co-Founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei and former OpenAI executives, also received a $2 billion investment from Alphabet in 2023.

When Microsoft-backed OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November 2022, it set off an AI arms race. The company closed a $6.6 billion funding round in October, potentially raising its valuation to $157 billion, thanks to the introduction of new products and its growing popularity.