Anthropic surpasses OpenAI with $965 billion valuation after $65 billion funding round

Anthropic has raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round, pushing its post-money valuation to $965 billion. The San Francisco company has now surpassed OpenAI as the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup. OpenAI’s last valuation stood at $730 billion.

The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. A broad group of co-investors and significant backers joined them, including Capital Group, Coatue, GIC, ICONIQ, Blackstone, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Temasek. The round also includes $15 billion of previously committed investments from major technology companies, among them $5 billion from Amazon.

Anthropic was founded in 2021. Just three months ago, its valuation was $380 billion. The new figure represents nearly two and a half times that amount in a very short period.

Revenue and demand are accelerating

The company’s revenue run rate crossed $47 billion earlier this month, according to Anthropic. A revenue run rate is the expected annual revenue based on current performance. The growth has been driven largely by demand for Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool. Since Anthropic improved its coding technology in November, hundreds of businesses have signed up to use it, the New York Times reports.

“This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens,” said Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer.

Alongside the funding announcement, Anthropic unveiled a new flagship model called Claude Opus 4.8. According to Vals AI, a company that tracks AI performance, Opus 4.8 scored 10 percent higher than its predecessor on vibecoding benchmarks. Vibecoding refers to generating software from instructions written in plain, conversational language. The new model also outperforms its predecessor in mathematics.

New partners and expanded computing power

The funding round includes three new strategic infrastructure partners: Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. These companies manufacture memory, storage, and logic chips that are essential for running AI systems at scale.

Anthropic has also significantly expanded its computing capacity. The company signed agreements for up to five gigawatts of new capacity with Amazon, five gigawatts of next-generation chip capacity with Google and Broadcom, and access to GPU capacity through SpaceX’s Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 facilities. Anthropic states that Claude is now the first frontier AI model available on all three of the world’s largest cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Anthropic plans to use the new capital to advance its AI safety and interpretability research, expand computing infrastructure, and grow its products and partnerships.

The company’s public profile has risen sharply in recent months. Anthropic’s AI model Mythos was described as highly capable at finding and exploiting hidden software flaws. The company also reportedly advised Pope Leo XIV on a papal encyclical addressing AI’s risks to humanity, and became embroiled in a public dispute with the Pentagon over the use of AI in warfare.

Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX are all now in a race toward public markets. SpaceX recently revealed its IPO prospectus. OpenAI plans to file for a public offering in the coming weeks. Anthropic insiders have indicated the company is also considering an IPO, potentially later this year, though Anthropic has declined to comment on those plans.

Sources

• Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation – Anthropic
• Anthropic Tops OpenAI to Become the World’s Most Valuable A.I. Start-Up – The New York Times