Anthropic is in advanced discussions to raise as much as $10 billion in fresh capital, people familiar with the talks said. Iconiq Capital is leading the round, with TPG, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Menlo Ventures expected to join. The financing could value the San Francisco-based artificial-intelligence company at about $170 billion, according to the sources. The size of the prospective round is roughly double the $5 billion Anthropic had initially targeted, reflecting stronger-than-anticipated investor demand. Anthropic has also spoken with the Qatar Investment Authority and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC about participating, the people said. Negotiations are ongoing and the final amount could still change. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic last raised $3.5 billion in March at a $61.5 billion valuation. Fresh funding would bolster its competition with rivals such as OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, both of which have secured multi-billion-dollar war chests this year to expand data-center capacity and develop next-generation models. The latest talks come as Anthropic positions itself as a safety-focused AI developer. This month the company disclosed it had collaborated with the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration on a classifier meant to block potentially dangerous queries and announced a partnership that lets thousands of government social workers use its Claude models to automate paperwork.