Anthropic becomes the world’s most valuable AI startup, nears $1 trillion valuation and surpasses OpenAI

The AI arms race just took another sharp turn.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has climbed past OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable AI startup after announcing a staggering $65 billion Series H financing round, valuing the company at $965 billion. The deal nearly triples Anthropic’s valuation from February, when investors valued the startup at $380 billion.

The new financing, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, signals how aggressively Wall Street and Silicon Valley are betting on AI companies capable of turning hype into revenue at scale.

Anthropic raises $65 billion in Series H funding, surpasses OpenAI to become Silicon Valley’s most valuable AI company

“Anthropic has raised $65 billion in Series H funding led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money,” the startup said in a news release Thursday.

Anthropic appears to be doing exactly that.

The startup’s growth has been fueled by Claude Code, its AI coding assistant that has gained traction across startups, enterprises, and developer teams racing to automate software work. Anthropic said Thursday that its annualized revenue run rate has surged to $47 billion, up from $30 billion earlier this year and roughly $10 billion last year.

That kind of revenue growth is starting to separate a handful of AI companies from the rest of the market. Investors are no longer paying premium prices for demos and promises alone. They want signs that AI products are becoming embedded inside real workflows, especially software development, cybersecurity, enterprise operations, and research.

Anthropic spent Thursday reminding the market that it intends to compete across all of those categories.

The company released Claude Opus 4.8, its newest flagship model, alongside Claude Mythos Preview, a cybersecurity-focused AI model available to a limited number of companies. Anthropic says the system offers advanced cyber capabilities at a time when governments and enterprises are pouring billions into AI-driven security tools.

“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 in Thursday’s press release. “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 funding lands as the AI industry moves into its next major phase: public markets.

Several of the biggest AI players are quietly preparing for IPOs after private valuations climbed into territory once reserved for the largest public tech companies on Earth.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week ahead of a planned public offering. Musk merged SpaceX with his AI startup SpaceXAI in February, creating a combined company valued at roughly $1.25 trillion.

OpenAI is reportedly preparing confidential IPO paperwork of its own and could move ahead with a public debut as early as September, according to CNBC. Anthropic, according to previous reports, has already started internal preparations for an IPO, though the timing remains uncertain.

The pace of the numbers is becoming difficult to ignore.

Less than two years ago, the AI industry was still debating whether generative AI would become a sustainable business. Now three AI companies are flirting with trillion-dollar valuations, Wall Street is rewarding startups with public-company-sized revenue multiples, and investors are treating AI infrastructure like the next internet platform shift.

Anthropic’s latest raise sends a message that the battle between OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google DeepMind, and other model makers is no longer about research prestige alone.

It’s becoming a fight over revenue, distribution, enterprise dependence, and who gets to become the operating layer for the AI economy.

Anthropic founders