Anthropic soars to $965bn valuation, leapfrogging OpenAI

Anthropic has usurped OpenAI as the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence company, soaring to a $965bn valuation ahead of expected public listings by the rival firms.

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude family of chatbots, said on Thursday that it had raised $65bn from private investors after a funding-raising round led by Altimeter Capital, Greenoaks, Dragoneer and Sequoia Capital.

The announcement catapults Anthropic, led by CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei, ahead of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which attracted an $852bn valuation in its last fundraising round in March.

“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,” Anthropic’s Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said in a statement.

Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner hailed the adoption of Claude among the “world’s most demanding organisations” as evidence of Anthropic’s command in the field.

“This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation and capture the enormous opportunity ahead,” Gerstner said.

Founded in 2021 by former researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic has rapidly emerged as one of the leading players in Silicon Valley’s scramble to dominate AI.

Anthropic’s Claude, first launched in 2023, is among the most popular AI models worldwide.

In March, the San Francisco-based company said that the chatbot was receiving more than 1 million new sign-ups each day.

While achieving stellar success in rapid time, Anthropic has also faced challenges – in particular a high-profile dispute with US President Donald Trump’s administration, which has labelled the firm a “supply chain risk” over its refusal to allow unrestricted access to its tools for military purposes.

Anthropic unveiled its latest iteration of Claude, Opus 4.8, in a separate announcement on Thursday, calling it a “modest but tangible improvement” on its predecessor.

Anthropic, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX are all expected to go public in the near future in what are expected to be among the biggest initial public offerings in history.

Jay R. Ritter, an emeritus professor at the University of Florida who specialises in IPOs, said Anthropic has generated a lot of market excitement due to its widespread use by companies for software coding.

“This is a big market where apparently Anthropic has the best product,” Ritter told Al Jazeera.

“The increase in valuation in a short period of time is unprecedented for a startup, although publicly traded tech companies such as SK Hynix, Nvidia, and Alphabet have seen even bigger increases, although not as much in percentage terms,” Ritter said, referring to the South Korean and US chip giants, and Google’s parent company.

While it remains to be seen whether the massive investments pouring into AI are creating a bubble, the handful of successful firms that are likely to emerge in the field could see enormous profits, Ritter said.

“Nobody wants to use the eighth best product, so these companies are either one of the handful of successful firms, or they will have a zero market share,” he said.

“The tech industry is different than the restaurant industry, where there are not large economies of scale, and where competition limits the profit margins.”