Anthropic hits $965bn valuation, overtaking OpenAI

TL;DR:

  • Anthropic raised $65bn (about £51bn) in a Series H round at a $965bn (£760bn) post-money valuation, overtaking OpenAI’s $852bn March valuation to become the world’s most valuable AI start-up.
  • The figure has more than doubled from $380bn in February, with run-rate revenue crossing $47bn this month — growth Anthropic attributes to enterprise adoption of Claude Code and its Cowork tools.
  • Both Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing for possible public listings as early as this year, turning private funding rounds into a staging ground for the biggest AI IPOs yet.

Anthropic said on Thursday it had raised $65bn at a $965bn post-money valuation, the clearest signal yet of how decisively the company has moved from challenger to front-runner in the generative AI race. The Series H round, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital with Coatue and ICONIQ as co-leads, pushes Anthropic past OpenAI, last valued at $852bn in March.

How the numbers stack up

The valuation has more than doubled since February’s $380bn, a pace that reflects both investor appetite for frontier-AI stakes and Anthropic’s own revenue trajectory — run-rate revenue crossed $47bn earlier this month. Strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix joined the round, which folds in $15bn of previously committed hyperscaler money, including $5bn from Amazon. Amazon had pledged up to $25bn (about £20bn) in April as Anthropic committed to spending more than $100bn on its cloud over the next decade.

The Guardian’s reporting frames the round as a reordering of the industry’s power dynamics rather than a simple fundraise. Anthropic has leaned into enterprise and coding services and positioned itself as the more safety-conscious lab — a stance underlined by its current legal stand-off with the Pentagon over refusing to relax safeguards, and its decision to withhold its Mythos model over cybersecurity concerns.

Looking forward

For UK business readers, the relevant thread is dependence: Claude Code and Cowork are now embedded in enterprise workflows, and a near-trillion-dollar valuation raises the stakes on pricing, availability and vendor concentration. Anthropic has already had to impose peak-hour usage limits, and the separate $36bn debt deal reportedly being arranged to buy Google chips shows how much capital the compute build-out still demands. A 2026 IPO would test whether public markets share private investors’ conviction.

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