Valuation soared to $350 billion! Anthropic announces a $5 billion employee cash-out plan, AI talent war intensifies.

According to informed sources, the artificial intelligence startup company Anthropic is offering current and former employees the opportunity to sell company shares, with the deal valuing the company at approximately 350 billion US dollars. This allows employees to cash out at a valuation level close to the company's most recent funding round of 300 billion US dollars. The sources say that the company has raised between 5 billion and 6 billion US dollars for this share sale, but the final amount will depend on the number of shares that eligible Anthropic employees choose to sell. Anthropic's latest funding round earlier this month resulted in a post-investment valuation of 380 billion US dollars. Anthropic declined to comment on this new share sale plan. The transaction will involve external investors, not the company itself, acquiring these internal shares. One source indicated that the deal will be open to current and former employees who have been with the company for at least 12 months. For startups, secondary share sales are becoming an increasingly common practice, allowing employees to benefit from the company's valuation growth even if the company is not acquired or has not yet gone public. In the competitive AI talent market, as more large startups choose to prolong privatization, this strategy has become crucial. Companies like Stripe Inc. and SpaceX also allow employees to sell shares. Anthropic's biggest competitor, OpenAI, regularly conducts share sales, including a 6.6 billion US dollar secondary share transaction last year when the company was valued at 500 billion US dollars. It is worth noting that Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX have recently taken steps to pave the way for possible future IPOs. In recent days, Anthropic released another tool seen as "disruptive" by the market, further intensifying concerns among investors about traditional software business models, and causing IBM Corp's stock price to plummet on Monday. Anthropic announced updates to its Claude platform, introducing a new feature that significantly reduces the maintenance and analysis costs of COBOL systems. COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) may not be well-known at a popular level, but it has long been widely used in critical systems such as banking, aviation, and government, and is a key business foundation for IBM's enterprise services. Recently, on the eve of the explosive growth of AI technology, Anthropic's leader Dario Amodei made a shocking prediction: AI is in a "dusk of exponential growth," and by 2026, humans will usher in a "genius kingdom in the data center" composed of tens of thousands of top minds. Amodei also stated that Anthropic's revenue is skyrocketing at a rate of 10 times.