Anthropic’s Mythos Spooked DeepSeek, Prompting Its $7.4 Billion Fundraising

Up until two months ago, DeepSeek, the three-year-old Chinese AI lab, was an anomaly in the increasingly costly global AI battle. It had relied entirely on CEO Liang Wenfeng’s personal wealth and never raised outside money.

That changed in the middle of this month, when DeepSeek completed a $7.4 billion fundraising that valued the startup at more than $50 billion, the biggest ever first-time fundraising by a Chinese startup. The change of heart was prompted, say three people familiar with the CEO’s thinking, by Anthropic’s release in April of a preview of Mythos, a new model that the U.S. company said was so powerful that it can find and exploit software vulnerabilities, opening the door to potential chaos and misuse.