Anthropic raises $13B at $183B valuation, tripling its worth and closing in on OpenAI

Anthropic just pulled off one of the largest funding rounds in tech history. The AI startup announced Tuesday that it has secured $13 billion in new capital, catapulting its valuation to $183 billion—triple what it was worth just six months ago. The move places Anthropic within striking distance of OpenAI, its biggest rival.

The funding comes after weeks of speculation. Bloomberg had reported that Anthropic was lining up as much as $5 billion in fresh capital at a $170 billion valuation. Instead, the round nearly tripled in size, led by Iconiq, Fidelity Management & Research Co., and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other big names like Altimeter, General Catalyst, and Coatue joined in as well.

Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO, pointed to soaring demand. “From Fortune 500 companies to AI-native startups, our customers rely on Anthropic’s frontier models and platform products for their most important, mission-critical work,” he said in a statement. “We are seeing exponential growth in demand across our entire customer base. This financing demonstrates investors’ extraordinary confidence in our financial performance and the strength of their collaboration with us to continue fueling our unprecedented growth.”

The pace of growth is striking. Anthropic’s valuation has been on a steep climb since it introduced Claude in March 2023. The Amazon-backed company—founded by former OpenAI research executives Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, and Tom Brown—has been positioning itself as the safer, more steerable alternative to OpenAI.

Revenue tells part of the story. Anthropic’s run-rate jumped from $1 billion earlier this year to more than $5 billion by August, with over 300,000 business customers now using its products. That kind of traction explains why investors are writing such enormous checks at a time when many tech valuations are tightening.

The rivalry with OpenAI looms large. OpenAI is in the middle of a secondary sale that could value the company at about $500 billion. Anthropic’s new round, just four years after its founding, puts it in a rare spot: a challenger closing the gap with a market leader in record time.

The company says it will use the fresh capital injection to strengthen safety research, meet growing enterprise demand, and accelerate global expansion. For a startup that began in 2021 with a mission to build “steerable, interpretable, and robust” AI, the numbers are staggering. And now, with fresh capital in hand, Anthropic is signaling it’s ready to battle OpenAI head-on.