Anthropic overtakes OpenAI as the world's most valuable startup after latest funding round

Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI to become the world's most valuable startup after raising $65 billion in fresh funding. The deal values the AI company at $965 billion post-money, pushing the maker of Claude ahead of OpenAI's most recently disclosed valuation of $852 billion and giving it the lead in the race between the two biggest private artificial intelligence companies.

Anthropic announced the milestone in a blog post last week, saying the Series H funding round was backed by investors including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital. The company also revealed that its annualised revenue run rate has crossed $47 billion, highlighting the rapid growth of its AI business.

Anthropic said its annual revenue run rate has grown from about $10 billion last year to $47 billion now, driven by increasing demand for Claude among businesses and developers.

Claude is the money-maker

A major driver of Anthropic's growth is Claude, the company's AI model and chatbot platform. Anthropic said businesses across industries are increasingly using Claude in their day-to-day operations, while more individuals are turning to the chatbot and its related tools for work.

Krishna Rao, Anthropic's chief financial officer, said Claude had become "increasingly indispensable" for customers around the world, with demand for products such as Claude Code and Cowork continuing to rise. The company said the latest funding will help it expand infrastructure, advance AI research and bring Claude to more workplaces globally.

The funding round attracted a wide range of investors, including Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ and XN. Anthropic said the total also includes $15 billion in previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including $5 billion from Amazon. Strategic infrastructure partners such as Micron, Samsung and SK hynix also participated in the round.

Anthropic's expansion plans

Meanwhile, to support future growth, Anthropic has significantly expanded its computing capacity. The company said it has signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of additional capacity, with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, and with SpaceX for access to GPU resources through its Colossus infrastructure.

Claude is now available through Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, although AWS remains Anthropic's primary cloud and training partner.

Meanwhile, the latest figures underline how Anthropic's enterprise-focused strategy has reshaped the AI landscape. While OpenAI remains closely associated with consumer-facing products such as ChatGPT, Anthropic has positioned Claude as a tool for businesses, developers and coding workflows.

Claude Code, in particular, has emerged as one of the company's fastest-growing products and has become a key driver of revenue growth.