Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Thursday it raised $65 billion (€55.8 billion) in private finance and raised its valuation to $965 billion (829 billion euros). This has made Claude chatbot’'s five-year-old maker, Wall Street’, possibly one of the world's most valuable start-up’s moving towards launch.
The announcement puts Anthropic’i ahead of its chief competitor, ChatGPT producer OpenAI’, in terms of both market capitalization and reported revenue. Anthropic said it now generates an annual revenue of $47 billion (€40.4 billion) by selling its technology to people and organizations that use Claude to code and perform other business and personal tasks on their behalf.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, and now both AI firms, Elon Musk’'s rocket and AI company SpaceX’, are also expected to become public. All three are still losing more money than they earn, which raises AI bubble concerns.
San Francisco-based Anthropic said the new funding round was led by investment firms Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks Capital and Sequoia Capital.
Krishna Rao, chief financial officer of Anthropic, said in a statement that “This fund will help us meet the historic demand we live in, stay on the research frontier, and bring Claude’ to more places where work takes place.
Anthropic also released its latest AI model on Thursday, called Claude Opus 4.8, which it says is better than previous models in coding and other professional work.
The rapid growth of Anthropic’ and the growing popularity of Claude’ caused OpenAI’ to catch up, despite its initial leadership in making ChatGPT’ a known name that ignited a commercial AI explosion.
OpenAI last reported in March that it was moving towards a valuation of $852 billion (€732 billion) after a $122 billion (€104.8 billion) fundraising round. The value of SpaceX’ was $800 billion (€680 billion) last year, but its value rose to $1.25 trillion (€1.06 trillion) after the space research company merged with Musk’'s xAI’si in February.
Musk recently announced plans for one of the largest stock sales ever, and will be able to make the offer available to investors next week.
OpenAI also removed a major hurdle toward its initial public offering goals after a federal court last week dismissed Musk’, OpenAI co-founder and first donor, after weeks of jury hearings over whether the company betrayed its original nonprofit mission. Musk said he plans to appeal.
Despite its newly discovered success, Anthropic has also faced obstacles this year; An annoying legal battle, especially with the administration of President Donald Trump over how AI tools like Claude can be used in war.
In February, Trump ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Claude, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the company's supply chain risk following an unusually public conflict between the Pentagon and CEO Dario Amodei. Anthropics has filed a lawsuit in two federal courts over an ongoing dispute.
At the same time, Anthropic is in talks with the White House about the cybersecurity capabilities and risks of its most powerful model, Mythos’, which has not yet been made available to the public.
Anthropic also had an influential role in Vatican’ ahead of Pope Leo XIV’'s call on Monday for a sound regulation of artificial intelligence and for its developers to work for the common good rather than profit.
The comprehensive manifesto ’Magnifica Humanitas“, Leo”'s first encyclopedia, has repeatedly stated that the collection of power and data in the hands of very few people in the private sector is a danger.
