Anthropic has officially surpassed OpenAI as the world's most valuable AI startup, achieving a landmark valuation of $965 billion in one of the largest private funding rounds in technology history. According to latest reports, the San Francisco-based company raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round, with the deal led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks Capital and Sequoia Capital. Each of the lead investors put in more than $2 billion, as reported by Bloomberg News. The funding nearly tripled Anthropic's previous valuation of $380 billion, which was set only three months prior, demonstrating exceptional growth momentum in the competitive AI landscape. As per Anthropic's CFO Krishna Rao, the new money will help the company "serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens."
The funding round includes $15 billion of previously committed hyperscaler investments, among them $5 billion from Amazon, as reported by Livemint. Bloomberg News reports that Google contributed several billion dollars to the round as part of a previously announced commitment to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic over time. The latest round was co-led by Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN, with significant participation from major investors including AMP PBC, Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw Ventures, DST Global, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Insight Partners, Jane Street, Lightspeed Venture Partners, MGX, NTTVC, NX1 Capital, Situational Awareness LP, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., and Temasek. Infrastructure partners contributed significantly, including Micron Technology, Samsung and SK Hynix -- companies that manufacture the storage, memory and logic chips fundamental to large-scale AI development. The company has significantly expanded its compute capacity in recent weeks, signing 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 in Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.
Alongside the funding announcement, Anthropic disclosed that its revenue run rate crossed $47 billion earlier this month, as reported by Livemint. The company has now informed investors that by the end of next month, its annualized run rate revenue would exceed $50 billion, representing a dramatic transformation from $4 billion in July of last year. As per CNBC TV18, Anthropic anticipates reporting $10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter, more than double from the previous three-month period. The company is also on pace for its first profitable quarter, marking a significant milestone in its financial trajectory. The large round came together in a matter of weeks, a sign of strong investor demand for the Claude maker, with the transaction surpassing Anthropic's initial $30 billion target thanks to contributions from Micron Technology Inc., Samsung Electronics Co., and SK Hynix Inc. that were not revealed. Since the Series G funding in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, with the company raising more than $130 billion since its founding in 2021, according to PitchBook data.
Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.8, a new flagship AI model that outperforms all publicly available alternatives on vibe coding -- the practice of generating software in response to prompts written in conversational English. According to Anthropic, the new model represents "a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor" and is better at coding, reasoning, and general knowledge work. The company's latest model release introduces "effort control," a new feature that lets users toggle between settings that determine how much computing power a model devotes to an answer. Anthropic reports that Opus 4.8's fast mode is three times cheaper than previous versions on the company's models, offering customers another way to cut costs while maintaining performance. Claude is now the first frontier model available on all major cloud platforms, enabling global enterprises to deploy AI solutions at unprecedented scale.
The funding milestone places Anthropic ahead of OpenAI in terms of valuation, with OpenAI having raised $122 billion in March this year, valuing the company at about $852 billion on a post-investment basis. Earlier this month, the San Francisco-based startup announced it would use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center, gaining access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs within a month. Elon Musk responded positively to the partnership, writing on X that "after spending time with senior members of the Anthropic team last week, I was reassured by their approach to AI safety. Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing." However, Musk clarified on Thursday that SpaceX had only agreed to lease its Colossus AI training data center clusters to Anthropic for six months, not multiple years as previously suggested. The company plans to use the latest funding for safety and interpretability research, expanding compute infrastructure to meet growing Claude demand, and scaling products and partnerships globally.
