Anthropic passes OpenAI to become biggest AI startup in the world

Anthropic raised $65 billion in new funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation, the company said Thursday, making it the most valuable artificial intelligence startup in the world and surpassing rival OpenAI.

The Series H round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, with co-leads including Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN. The raise also includes $15 billion of previously committed investments from hyperscalers, among them $5 billion from Amazon.

Anthropic, maker of the AI chatbot Claude, has now exceeded its valuation of $380 billion in February by almost two-and-a-half times.

Earlier this month, Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate surpassed $47 billion -- a figure the company had already revised upward from a $30 billion rate disclosed weeks prior, putting it roughly five times ahead of last year's annual pace. The company said a large portion of that growth has been driven by its AI coding tools, including Claude Code.

"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," Krishna Rao, Anthropic's CFO, said in a statement.

Alongside the funding announcement, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.8, an upgrade to its Opus class of models with stronger performance across coding, agentic tasks, and professional work.

The fundraising round also adds strategic infrastructure partners -- Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix -- whose involvement Anthropic said will help it scale compute capacity to meet growing demand. The company has recently signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of new capacity, with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, and with SpaceX for access to GPU capacity.

Investor enthusiasm for the round had been building for weeks. Anthropic was exploring a large-scale capital raise aimed at expanding its computing infrastructure, with demand from outside investors running well ahead of the planned raise. At least one institution willing to write a check of up to $5 billion had been unable to secure a meeting with CFO Krishna Rao.

A $122 billion financing round closed by OpenAI earlier this year established the ChatGPT maker's valuation at $852 billion. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by CEO Dario Amodei and colleagues who had previously worked at OpenAI.