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(Bloomberg) -- Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is in talks to raise $750 million in funding at a valuation of as much as $18.4 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter, continuing a streak of investments as it develops a chatbot emphasizing safety and responsible AI.

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The potential deal, being led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, has not yet been finalized, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t yet public. The investment was reported earlier by The Information. Anthropic declined to comment, and Menlo didn’t respond to a call seeking comment.

Even before this latest round, Anthropic has become one of the most well-funded AI startups in the industry. Alphabet Inc.’s Google in October committed to back Anthropic with $2 billion, and earlier this year Amazon.com Inc. agreed to an investment of as much as $4 billion. Both deals were structured as convertible notes, a type of debt that converts to equity at the startup’s next funding round.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, who left the company amid differences over the direction of the business. The startup has built its own conversational AI chatbot, Claude, that can perform tasks such summarizing, searching, answering questions and coding. It has positioned itself as safety-oriented, meaning it tries to guard against the potential harms that can come from AI tools. It also has registered as a so-called public-benefit corporation, an indication it seeks to further the good of a large number of people. It’s governed in part by what’s known as a Long-Term Benefit Trust, comprised of five financially disinterested members, separate from its corporate board.

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Anthropic also signed a major cloud agreement with Google earlier this year, a person familiar with the details said at the time. The pact, in which Anthropic will use Google’s suite of computing services, was even larger than the later investment, in October, and will stretch over multiple years, the person said. Amazon also has a deal with Anthropic in which the two-year-old startup will use services and chips from its AWS cloud-computing business. Cloud-services providers have been nabbing investments in promising startups to forge relationships with the companies developing the next wave of AI, which require vast computing resources. That means AI companies will be lucrative cloud customers in the future.