Anthropic Becomes World’s Most Valuable AI Startup After $965B Valuation Surge

Anthropic announced Thursday that it has raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.

The round was led by major investors including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, with additional backing from a wide group of global financial and strategic partners. The deal also includes $15 billion in previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including $5 billion from Amazon.

The new valuation places Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, making it the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup. 

While OpenAI initially grabbed global attention by targeting everyday consumers with chatbots, Anthropic built its company by focusing heavily on business infrastructure and software automation.

That enterprise-first strategy is paying off at an unprecedented scale. The company revealed that its annualized revenue run rate crossed $47 billion earlier this month. The Wall Street Journal reports that this revenue pace grew 80-fold in the first quarter alone, positioning the startup to potentially lock in an operating profit for the first time.

To keep up with the technical strain of this corporate adoption, Anthropic secured new chip partnerships with Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix. It also signed major infrastructure deals to drastically scale its computing power, securing five gigawatts of capacity from Amazon, another five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity from Google and Broadcom, and cutting-edge GPU access via SpaceX’s Colossus data centers.

Global influence and geopolitical friction

Anthropic’s rapid rise to dominance has not occurred in a vacuum. As the company's technical capabilities have expanded, it has found itself thrust directly into global politics, regulatory debates, and high-stakes ethical dilemmas.

The startup has positioned itself as a safety-minded organization, which has occasionally put it at odds with government entities.

The company is currently in a legal battle with the Pentagon after refusing to strip out safety safeguards that would allow its Claude model to be used for mass domestic surveillance or lethal autonomous weapons systems. 

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah also spoke at the Vatican presentation of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical, “Magnifica humanitas,” on May 25. 

The race to the public markets

This massive reshuffling of the AI power dynamic sets the stage for a dramatic showdown on Wall Street. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Elon Musk's SpaceX are all currently racing toward anticipated public listings.

SpaceX recently published its public offering prospectus, with an initial market debut expected on or around June 12 at a valuation projected to hit $1.75 trillion. Meanwhile, OpenAI is expected to file confidential paperwork for its own initial public offering in the coming weeks.

Also read: Claude Mythos Preview flagged thousands of possible open-source security flaws, reinforcing why Anthropic is keeping its most advanced cybersecurity model under tighter controls.