Four-year-old artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic has raised $3.5bn in a deal that triples its valuation to more than $60bn, as it aims to keep pace with OpenAI and ahead of newer rivals including China’s DeepSeek.

The investment comes a week after Anthropic launched its “most intelligent” model to date, named Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and will be spent on computing resources to develop new models, as well as international expansion in Asia and Europe.

The funding round, which was several times subscribed, suggests that investors remain bullish on about the potential for heavily lossmaking AI start-ups to continue their rapid growth, despite fears that rivals including DeepSeek are closing the gap with cheaper models and that the highly sophisticated technology is quickly becoming commoditised.