Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI As World's Most Valuable AI Startup

Anthropic has leapfrogged OpenAI to become the world's most valuable AI startup after raising US$65 billion in a fresh funding round that values the Claude maker at US$965 billion.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff, has rapidly transformed from a smaller challenger into one of the dominant players in generative AI, driven largely by enterprise demand for its coding tools.

The latest round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with strategic backing also coming from chip and memory giants Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix.

Anthropic said the new partners would help expand the computing capacity needed to support demand for Claude Code and its broader AI services.

Anthropic said its annualised revenue run rate has now crossed US$47 billion, up sharply from last year, as businesses increasingly adopt AI tools capable of generating and editing software code from natural language prompts.

The company also unveiled Claude Opus 4.8, its latest flagship model, which it claims delivers major improvements in coding and mathematics. The release further intensifies competition with OpenAI, which has been pushing its own coding product, Codex.

"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," Anthropic chief financial officer Krishna Rao (pictured) said.

The valuation places Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which was valued at between US$730 billion and US$852 billion in recent funding reports.

It also comes as the world's largest private AI and technology companies prepare for a potential wave of public listings, with OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk-linked ventures all reportedly weighing IPO plans.

Anthropic's rise has not been without controversy. The company has clashed with the Pentagon over military AI use and has positioned itself as a more safety-focused AI developer, with chief executive Dario Amodei repeatedly calling for stronger regulation.

The valuation follows Anthropic's reported US$200 billion Google Cloud infrastructure deal earlier this month.