Anthropic: From A $380 Billion Valuation In February To Nearly $1 Trillion By May, From $30 Billion To $47 Billion In Annualised Revenue, And From 1,000 Enterprise Customers At $1 Million-Plus. The Claude Maker Has Caught And Passed The Company It Was Founded To Compete Against
According to Forbes, CNBC, Invezz and WinBuzzer, Anthropic closed a new funding round on Thursday at a $965 billion post-money valuation, raising $65 billion in fresh capital and pushing the Claude maker past OpenAI as the world’s most valuable private artificial intelligence company.
OpenAI was most recently valued at $852 billion. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, with strategic investments from Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix; three of the chip suppliers powering the infrastructure beneath frontier AI itself.
The growth pace is historically extraordinary. In February 2026, Anthropic closed its Series G at a $380 billion valuation. Three months later, the company has more than doubled. Annualised revenue crossed $47 billion this month; a more than fivefold increase since the start of the year, driven by what CFO Krishna Rao called “the historic demand we are experiencing.”
More than 1,000 Claude customers now spend $1 million-plus annually, and enterprise contracts contribute roughly 80% of revenue. That mix gives the business a recurring, software-style profile that public-market investors can model.
The same week the deal closed, OpenAI filed confidentially with the SEC for an initial public offering. The two leading AI labs are now on diverging paths to capital; one private and richer than ever, one heading toward Wall Street.
Anthropic’s case is structural, not narrative. Claude has gained particular traction on enterprise coding workloads. The latest model, Claude Opus 4.8, reportedly scored 10% higher on the Vals AI benchmark than its predecessor for “vibe coding”; software written through conversational English prompts. The company has been embedded in the corporate AI buildout in a way OpenAI, with its heavier consumer skew, has not been.
The non-financial story matters too. Anthropic publicly sparred with the Pentagon this year after the Department of Defense designated the company a supply-chain risk in March 2026; a response to Anthropic declining to allow Claude to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of American citizens.
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement, but the case remains active. Anthropic itself has estimated the dispute puts hundreds of millions to multiple billions of dollars of 2026 revenue at risk.
In a separate but telling development, the company also advised Pope Leo XIV on his papal encyclical warning about the disruptive effects of artificial intelligence.
What this round actually buys. Fresh capital gives Anthropic more room to expand compute capacity, model research, and enterprise distribution. The Samsung-Micron-SK Hynix strategic investments are particularly notable. These are the memory chip suppliers whose own market caps just crossed $1 trillion on the same AI infrastructure demand.
The capital flow is now circular: the chipmakers funding the AI lab that drives demand for the chipmakers’ products. The competitive battlefield at the top of AI is no longer headline model releases. It is chips, cloud capacity, and contract-heavy corporate demand.
The verdict. Anthropic was founded five years ago by former OpenAI executives who left over safety disagreements. The market has now repriced the company past the entity it was founded to compete against. Whether Anthropic ever pursues its own IPO is the question that follows this round and at $965 billion private, the answer carries unusual weight.
A successful public listing at this valuation would put it among the most valuable public companies on earth. The path there depends on sustaining the revenue trajectory, absorbing rising compute costs as discounted infrastructure rates normalise, navigating active intellectual-property litigation, and continuing to win enterprise contracts faster than OpenAI can defend them.
For now the scoreboard reads clearly. Five years from founding. Three months from $380B to $965B. One week ahead of OpenAI’s IPO filing. The Claude maker is no longer chasing.
To check out our previous coverage on AI companies, frontier model labs, and the global AI race, read our articles here.
