How Anthropic became world’s most valuable AI startup, surpassing OpenAI with $965 billion valuation
Dario Amodei’s San Francisco-based AI company is now valued at $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s $730 billion valuation in one of the largest private financing rounds in tech history.
Anthropic raised $65 billion in its Series H funding round, pushing its post-money valuation to $965 billion and officially replacing OpenAI as the most valuable AI startup in the world. The deal, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks Capital and Sequoia Capital, nearly triples the company’s previous valuation of $380 billion set just three months ago.
Now What is Anthropic Value and Who is Behind the Financing?
The tour valued Anthropic at $900 billion pre-money; This is comfortably ahead of OpenAI’s latest valuation of $730 billion.
The $65 billion raise includes $15 billion in previously committed hyperscaler investments, including $5 billion from Amazon. Infrastructure partners also contributed, including Samsung and SK Hynix, companies that make the storage, memory and logic chips essential to large-scale AI development, as well as Micron Technology, whose stock market valuation recently surpassed $1 trillion.
The company has raised more than $130 billion since its founding in 2021, according to PitchBook. Its broader investor base includes Capital Group, Menlo Ventures, Iconiq Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and tech giants Amazon and Google.
Anthropic’s Revenue Run Rate Exceeds $47 Billion
Alongside the funding announcement, Anthropic announced that its revenue rate exceeded $47 billion earlier this month, an annual projection based on current performance. The figure reflects the commercial momentum generated by the company’s AI coding capabilities, which have attracted hundreds of enterprise customers since Anthropic significantly improved its coding technology in November last year.
New Claude Opus 4.8 Model Leads AI Coding Benchmarks
Alongside the funding announcement, Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 4.8, a new flagship AI model that the company says outperforms all publicly available alternatives at jitter coding, the practice of creating software in response to prompts written in spoken English.
By the way New York TimeOpus 4.8 scored ten percent higher than its predecessor in Vals AI’s vibration coding test, said Rayan Krishnan, general manager of Vals AI, a firm that tracks the performance of leading artificial intelligence systems. The new model also showed advances in mathematics, an area where leading AI systems are advancing rapidly.
How Did Anthropic Reach This Value So Fast?
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei. Its rise to near-trillion-dollar status in less than four years is remarkable even by the standards of the current AI investment cycle.
For context, it took nearly a decade for OpenAI, whose ChatGPT chatbot is widely credited with fueling the current boom when it launched in 2022, to reach its $730 billion valuation. Antropik surpassed this in about half the time.
The company’s profile has risen sharply in recent months, in part due to Dario Amodei’s public stance on AI safety and calls for regulatory oversight of the technology. This position led Anthropic into a public dispute with the Pentagon over the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. The company was also founded by Pope Benedict XIV. He also advised Leo on the recent papal encyclical in which he warned about the risks artificial intelligence poses to humanity.
Anthropic has also released a powerful AI model called Mythos, specifically described as having the ability to detect and exploit hidden vulnerabilities in software.
Anthropic and OpenAI: The Race to Go Public
The funding widens the competitive gap between Anthropic and OpenAI at a time when both companies are weighing stock market listings. While OpenAI plans to confidentially file for an initial public offering in the coming weeks, Anthropic insiders have indicated that the company is considering going public, potentially as soon as this year, but Anthropic has declined to comment on those plans.
In response to Anthropic’s growing presence in the coding software market, OpenAI is cutting back on side projects to focus its resources on its own coding product, Codex. Elon Musk’s SpaceX also signed a deal to buy Cursor, a coding interface widely used by software developers, and agreed to sell some computing capacity to Anthropic.
What Will the Fund Be Used For?
Anthropic said the capital will support security and interpretability research, expand its computing infrastructure, and scale Claude products and partnerships. The addition of chipmakers Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix as strategic investors is aimed at meeting computing demands, particularly those driven by increased adoption of Claude Code, the company’s coding tool for developers.
“This funding will help us meet the historic demand we are experiencing, stay in the research space, and bring Claude to more places where work is happening,” Rao said.
