OpenAI no longer the most valuable AI startup as Anthropic hits $965 billion

Anthropic has surged ahead of rival OpenAI in the AI valuation race after raising $65 billion in a Series H funding round that valued the company at $965 billion, making it one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world.

The funding comes just months after OpenAI closed a record-breaking $122 billion financing round in March that valued the ChatGPT maker at $852 billion. Anthropic's latest valuation now places it ahead of its biggest rival as investors continue to pour money into companies building frontier AI models.

The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ and XN. It also includes $15 billion of previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including $5 billion from Amazon.

The fundraising follows a sharp rise in adoption of Anthropic's Claude AI models across enterprises. The company said its annualised revenue run rate crossed $47 billion earlier this month as businesses increasingly deploy Claude across core operations.

"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," Krishna Rao, Chief Financial Officer at Anthropic, 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," Rao added.

AI spending race intensifies

The fresh capital is expected to be used to expand compute infrastructure, fund AI safety and interpretability research and scale products and partnerships.

Anthropic also unveiled a series of infrastructure agreements aimed at supporting growing demand for Claude. The company said it has signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of new compute capacity, and with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity. It has also secured access to GPU capacity from SpaceX's Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 facilities.

The company said Claude is now available across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, while AWS remains its primary cloud provider and training partner.

Beyond financial investors, Anthropic has also brought in strategic infrastructure partners including Micron, Samsung and SK hynix, whose memory and semiconductor technologies are critical to AI computing infrastructure.