Anthropic’s $124m Series A funded its early AI safety research
The May 2021 financing was led by Jaan Tallinn and supported model research, prototypes and hiring.
Anthropic announced a $124m Series A on May 28, 2021. Jaan Tallinn led the round, with James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, the Center for Emerging Risk Research and Eric Schmidt among the participants.
The company planned to use the money for compute-intensive research and prototypes of large AI systems whose behavior could be understood and directed more reliably. Its stated priorities included interpretability, model robustness and incorporating human feedback into development and deployment.
Led by Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic was building on work its team had conducted on GPT-3 and other machine-learning research. The financing also supported recruitment across research, engineering and operations.
Use of funds
Compute-intensive research into reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems
Build prototypes and hire researchers, engineers and operations staff