Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) used to be the also-ran in the AI race. But on Thursday, the company announced it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion, ahead of OpenAI’s (OPAI.PVT) March valuation of $852 billion, making it the most valuable AI startup.
Anthropic’s rise is largely thanks to the success of its enterprise offerings, particularly its Claude Code coding software.
In April, the company said its annual revenue run rate topped $30 billion, up from $9 billion last year. But on Thursday, Anthropic updated that number, saying its run rate stood at $47 billion earlier this month.
Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital led the latest funding round, which also included $15 billion in prior commitments from hyperscalers, including Amazon (AMZN), the company said.
Anthropic is in a sprint to go public before archrival OpenAI. The public offerings are two of the most anticipated of the year outside of SpaceX (SPAX.PVT).
Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei speaks during the 56th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 20, 2026. (Reuters/Denis Balibouse/File Photo)
“Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs,” Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said in a statement.
In addition to the funding announcement, Anthropic debuted Claude Opus 4.8, its latest flagship AI model, on Thursday.
According to Anthropic, Opus 4.8 tops both OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Gemini 3.1 Pro in a number of synthetic AI-focused benchmarks. That includes things like agentic coding, agentic financial analysis, and agentic computer use.
Wall Street analysts have been largely positive on Anthropic, thanks to its relatively judicious spending compared to OpenAI.
But the company has faced its share of controversies. President Trump previously said he would ban the use of Anthropic’s software across government agencies after CEO Dario Amodei said he wouldn’t allow the Pentagon to use it for the mass surveillance of Americans or to operate fully autonomous weapons.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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