Feb 10 (Reuters) - Blackstone is increasing its investment in the Claude chatbot maker Anthropic, raising its stake to about $1 billion at a valuation of roughly $350 billion, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
AI startups continue to attract heavy 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 as part of 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-backed startup at $350 billion, reflecting strong investor appetite for leading generative AI companies.
Blackstone and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
Anthropic, which develops the Claude family of AI models, launched a new flagship system called Opus 4.6 last week, as it steps up efforts to deliver more advanced tools for enterprise and consumer use.
The company said the new model offers improved reasoning, coding and complex text-generation capabilities compared with earlier versions.
Opus 4.6 is also designed to work on tasks for longer periods 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, after recent advances in artificial intelligence reignited concerns that AI could disrupt established business models across the sector.
Software stocks in Europe and the United States slumped last week following 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 viewed as particularly exposed to disruption, as tools such as Claude increasingly automate routine tasks that have long underpinned pricing power and revenue growth for many companies.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Milana Vinn in New York; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)
