Google-backed developer Anthropic raised $450 million in its latest funding round, cash earmarked to improve its AI systems including chatbot Claude and support ongoing research on ethical issues around the technology.

Anthropic noted in a statement the investment was led by venture capital company Spark Capital, and includes backing from technology giants including its biggest stakeholder Google and Salesforce.

Zoom Video Communications’ ventures arm was also named as a backer, although the company already announced a partnership with Anthropic last week.

The fresh capital will support Anthropic’s “continued work developing helpful, harmless and honest” language models, CEO Dario Amodei said, adding it will aid its mission to “put safety at the frontier” of AI research and development.

Anthropic also aims to grow its AI product portfolio and stated it is working on a feature which will allow business clients to submit “hundreds of pages of materials” to be analysed by Claude.

The company released Claude in March to rival OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT product.

It also moved to publish a “moral compass” as a guideline for its technology in the following months.