Anthropic’s valuation reached a whopping $965 billion in its latest financing round — surpassing rival OpenAI to become the most valuable artificial intelligence startup.
Anthropic, long seen as an upstart seeking to challenge OpenAI’s initial dominance in the field, said Thursday it had secured $65 billion in Series H funding — in spite of clashes with the White House earlier this year.
OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in March after closing a monster $122 billion funding round.
Anthropic, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s AI outfit housed within SpaceX are all expected to go public this year. SpaceX recently filed paperwork to launch its IPO around June 12, boldly aiming for a $1.5 trillion valuation.
San Francisco-based Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, has been on a tear this year with surging revenue thanks to its AI coding assistant, Claude Code. The company logged a $47 billion revenue run rate on Thursday, up from $10 billion in revenue last year.
The excitement around Anthropic comes after the company launched the Claude Mythos model, warning that the tech designed to find cyber threats might be too dangerous for wide release. More recently, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah joined Pope Leo at the Vatican for the pontiff’s unveiling of a high-profile document on preserving human dignity in the age of AI.
Anthropic released a new model called Claude Opus 4.8 on Thursday.
“Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs,” Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said Thursday.
“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.”
The momentum comes after a series of dramatic headlines for Anthropic, which the Pentagon labelled a “supply-chain risk” in March — barring it from working with the War Department and prohibiting contractors from using the company’s AI models in their work with the Pentagon. Anthropic sued to fight the designation, a case that is still playing out in court.
Signs of Anthropic’s valuation run-up flashed last month on so-called secondary markets, where shares of still-private companies are traded. Buyers scooping up coveted Anthropic shares vaulted the AI giant’s valuation on some trading platforms to $1 trillion.
Private stock marketplace Hiive told The Post in April that the price for Anthropic shares has surged 211% to roughly $900 over the previous three months, becoming one of the most actively traded companies on its platform.
In another sign of the red-hot market for Anthropic, The Post reported last month that one Silicon Valley dealmaker was so desperate for stock in the company that he was seeking to swap his 14-acre estate for shares.
Meanwhile, demand for shares of Sam Altman’s OpenAI has reportedly been flagging on secondary markets.
The company recently went through a bruising legal fight with Musk, whose suit accusing OpenAI of betraying its founding missions was tossed out in Oakland, Calif.
Anthropic’s latest round of financing was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.
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