Anthropic Raises $65 Billion at $965 Billion Valuation, Surpassing OpenAI as the World's Most Valuable AI Startup

Record Funding Round

Anthropic announced a $65 billion Series H funding round on Thursday, pushing its post-money valuation to $965 billion. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, with co-leads including Coatue and ICONIQ. Strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix also joined. The total includes $15 billion from previously committed hyperscaler investments, among them $5 billion from Amazon. Amazon had disclosed in April a plan to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, separate from an earlier $8 billion investment, as part of a deal for Anthropic to spend over $100 billion on Amazon cloud technologies over the next decade.

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.

Valuation Leapfrogs OpenAI

The new valuation vaults Anthropic past chief rival OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion after its own record $122 billion fundraising round in March. Anthropic’s valuation has more than doubled since its Series G round in February, when it raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation. The leap cements Anthropic as the highest-valued AI startup in Silicon Valley and intensifies the battle for dominance in the rapidly growing AI sector.

Surging Revenue and New Model

Anthropic reported that its annualized revenue run rate crossed $47 billion earlier this month, up from $30 billion at the start of 2026 and $10 billion for all of 2025. The growth is fueled largely by Claude, its AI assistant used for code writing and other professional tasks. On Thursday, the company also launched its newest model, Claude Opus 4.8, touting improved coding and complex task performance. Anthropic also unveiled Claude Mythos Preview, a model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities, initially available only to a select group of enterprises.

Since our series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, and our run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month.

IPO and Market Context

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders and is now among the world’s most valuable startups as it heads toward a widely anticipated initial public offering in the coming months. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to go public this year, as is Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which merged with his AI venture xAI in February to reach a $1.25 trillion valuation. However, all three companies continue to lose money, fueling concerns of a potential AI bubble.

Challenges and Controversies

Anthropic faces operational and legal headwinds. The company has struggled to keep pace with surging demand, introducing peak-hour usage limits and encouraging off-peak usage with increased compute capacity. It is also entangled in a legal battle with the Pentagon after refusing to allow its technology for autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance, resulting in its placement on a Washington blacklist. On the international stage, however, Anthropic garnered favor with the Vatican: co‑founder Christopher Olah was the sole AI industry representative at the presentation of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas.”