Anthropic, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company behind the Claude family of chatbots, has raised $65 billion in a new funding round that values the firm at $965 billion — leapfrogging its arch-rival OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, which was valued at $852 billion in March. The round was led by prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms Altimeter Capital, Greenoaks, Dragoneer and Sequoia Capital, and also included $15 billion in previously committed investments from cloud providers, among them $5 billion from Amazon. Semiconductor makers Micron, Samsung and South Korean chip giant SK Hynix participated as strategic infrastructure partners.
Founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and other former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic has distinguished itself by focusing on enterprise clients and AI safety, rather than the consumer-facing approach initially favoured by its rivals. That strategy appears to be paying off: Claude, first launched in 2023, is now the first frontier AI model available across all three of the world's largest cloud platforms — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure — and was attracting more than one million new sign-ups per day as of March. "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," said Anthropic's Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao.
Alongside the funding announcement, Anthropic unveiled two model developments. It launched Claude Opus 4.8, described as a "modest but tangible improvement" on its predecessor, priced at the same level and showing particular gains in honesty — early testers report it is more likely to flag uncertainties and less prone to making unsupported claims. The company also said it plans to roll out Mythos, a next-generation large language model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities, to all customers in the coming weeks. Due to concerns about its power, Mythos is currently restricted to security partners — including Amazon, Microsoft and Apple — under an arrangement called Project Glasswing.
The announcement comes as Anthropic navigates a contentious legal dispute with the US Department of Defense, which designated the company a "supply chain risk" after it refused to grant the military unrestricted access to its AI models. Anthropic has sued the Pentagon, calling the designation unconstitutional retaliation. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to go public in the near future, potentially in what would be among the largest initial public offerings in history. Elon Musk's SpaceX, which absorbed his AI venture xAI in February, may precede them, targeting a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion.
IPO specialist Jay R. Ritter, an emeritus professor at the University of Florida, said Anthropic's rapid rise in valuation is unprecedented for a startup, driven largely by its strength in AI-assisted software coding for businesses. He cautioned, however, that the winner-takes-most dynamics of the technology industry mean the stakes are high: "Nobody wants to use the eighth best product, so these companies are either one of the handful of successful firms, or they will have zero market share."