Anthropic has bagged $65bn in fresh funding, putting the Claude outfit ahead of OpenAI in the AI valuation bunfight.
According to the Financial Times, the AI lab has wrapped up a funding round that nearly triples its valuation, with investors piling in ahead of a possible public listing as soon as this year.
The Claude chatbot maker was valued at $900bn before the new cash arrived. That puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $852bn, and keeps the AI bubble machine hissing nicely.
Altimeter Capital founder and CEO Brad Gerstner said: “Claude’s latest advancements have driven large-scale adoption among the world’s most demanding organisations. This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation.”
Anthropic said its run-rate revenue crossed $47bn this month. The outfit claims that is more than five times higher than at the start of the year, which is bonkers even by AI hype standards.
Investors are building their stakes before a possible initial public offering, while OpenAI and SpaceX are snuffling around public listings too.
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has overseen a run where new tools have rattled markets from wealth managers to cyber security outfits. Its Mythos model, released to a small gang of trusted partners, has worried governments and financial regulators because of its advanced cybersecurity capabilities.
On Thursday, Anthropic said it was moving towards a wider Mythos release “in the coming weeks”.
It pushed out Claude Opus 4.8, which it claimed was more “honest” and more likely to flag uncertainty rather than make stuff up. The company is still fighting the US Department of Defense over military use of its technology, but that has barely touched its financial momentum.
The new funding includes Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, the three big memory chipmakers whose kit Anthropic needs for its AI data centre habit. Their involvement follows circular AI deals involving cloud providers and chipmakers, including Nvidia, where suppliers, customers and investors all seem to be buying bits of each other.
That tangled setup has added to fears that the AI sector is turning into a cash-burning echo chamber.
Anthropic first aimed to raise $30bn from financial institutions, but infrastructure partners helped shove the total far higher. That came on top of $15bn already committed by Big Tech hyperscalers, including $5bn from Amazon.
Anthropic chief financial officer Krishna Rao said: “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 cash will go towards buying enough compute to meet demand, after Anthropic ran into capacity headaches in recent months.
Private investment giants Apollo and Blackstone have been working on a roughly $36bn debt deal to buy custom chips designed by Google and Broadcom. Anthropic intends to lease those chips, because apparently renting the future is now a balance-sheet strategy.
