Anthropic, once the lesser-known artificial intelligence competitor to OpenAI, has been on an inexorable rise over the past few months.<\/p>\n
The San Francisco company recently dueled with the Pentagon over the use of A.I. in warfare. It released a powerful A.I. model, Mythos<\/a>, that it said was uncannily capable of finding and exploiting hidden flaws in software. And the company advised Pope Leo XIV<\/a> on his papal encyclical delivered on Monday, in which he warned about safeguarding humanity from A.I.\u2019s most disruptive effects.<\/p>\n On Thursday, Anthropic<\/a> punctuated its ascent by officially passing OpenAI as the world\u2019s highest flying A.I. start-up. Anthropic said it had raised $65 billion in financing that values it at $900 billion before the inclusion of the new capital, a deal that puts it ahead of OpenAI\u2019s last valuation of $730 billion. The company also unveiled a new flagship A.I. model, Claude Opus 4.8, which is significantly better than its predecessor at generating computer code.<\/p>\n The new investment, which was led by investors including Green Oaks Capital, Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, boosted Anthropic\u2019s value by nearly two and a half times its previous valuation of $380 billion about three months<\/a> ago.<\/p>\n The funding underlined the company\u2019s success in developing A.I. technology that excels in writing software code, which has turned into a robust business. Since Anthropic improved its A.I. coding technology<\/a> in November, hundreds of businesses have signed up to pay for the software. The company said its \u201crevenue run rate,\u201d which is its expected revenue for the year based on its current performance, crossed $47 billion this month.<\/p>\n \u201cThis 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,\u201d said Krishna Rao, Anthropic\u2019s chief financial officer.<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s trajectory stands out, even amid a heated frenzy over A.I. Just 62 days ago, OpenAI \u2014 which had kicked off the A.I. boom with its release of the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022 \u2014 announced it had raised $122 billion in a funding that put its value at $730 billion, a number that it took roughly a decade to achieve. Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, has surpassed that in half the time.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s momentum has gathered steam in recent months as Dario Amodei, Anthropic\u2019s chief executive, has spoken out about the potential dangers of A.I. and called for regulation of the technology. That led to a bitter fight with the Pentagon<\/a> over how A.I. should be used in warfare, among other public imbroglios.<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s rise only adds to the contest between itself, OpenAI and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX as the private companies race to go public.<\/p>\n Last week, SpaceX revealed its public offering prospectus<\/a> and is expected to reach the stock market as soon as next month. OpenAI also plans to file confidentially for an initial public offering in the coming weeks. Anthropic insiders have said<\/a> the company was also considering an I.P.O. that could come as soon as this year, though the company has declined to comment.<\/p>\n In its latest funding, Anthropic brought in new strategic investors including Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix, companies that build storage, memory and logic chips that are crucial to the development of A.I. In a blog post, Anthropic said these strategic partners would help boost the company\u2019s computing power as demand for Claude Code grows.<\/p>\n Anthropic has now raised more than $130 billion since it was established, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups. Its roster of investors includes firms<\/a> such as Capital Group, Menlo Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as tech giants like Amazon and Google.<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s new Claude Opus 4.8 outperforms all other publicly available A.I. technologies on vibe coding, which is when A.I. technologies create software in response to prompts written in conversational English<\/a>. Opus 4.8 scored 10 percent higher on the vibe coding benchmark test from Vals AI, a company that tracks the performance of the latest A.I. technologies, compared with the previous Anthropic model, said Rayan Krishnan, the chief executive of Vals AI.<\/p>\n The new model also outperformed its predecessor in mathematics, another area where the leading A.I. technologies continue to improve by leaps and bounds<\/a>.<\/p>\n