CALIFORNIA: Move fast, raise faster. Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company behind the Claude chatbot, has raised $65bn in a Series H funding round that values it at $965bn, overtaking rival OpenAI to claim the title of the world’s most valuable artificial-intelligence startup. The round, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, is a thunderclap moment for a firm that, not long ago, was written off as a well-meaning also-ran.
The deal eclipses OpenAI’s own blockbuster raise: in March, Sam Altman’s company secured $122bn at a valuation of $852bn. Anthropic has now leapfrogged it with room to spare, underscoring how rapidly the balance of power in AI is shifting. The new valuation puts Anthropic within striking distance of the $1tn mark, a threshold OpenAI itself is eyeing ahead of a possible initial public offering later this year.
The ascent has been rapid and, by the standards of Silicon Valley, unusually purposeful. Anthropic has quietly hoovered up enterprise customers while competitors squabbled over consumer mindshare. Its pivot towards coding assistants late last year proved a masterstroke, turbocharging adoption among the large businesses and developers who pay the fattest bills. “Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers,” said Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer. The company said it would continue to invest in tools such as Claude Code and Cowork.
Anthropic has also cultivated a reputation as the grown-up in a room full of cowboys. Where rivals have raced to strip out guardrails in pursuit of growth, Anthropic has staked its brand on safety. That positioning paid an unlikely diplomatic dividend this month, when one of the company’s co-founders attended Pope Leo’s release of a sweeping 43,000-word encyclical warning of AI’s dangers and calling for restraint. The Vatican’s seal of concern, it seems, is not bad for the fundraising deck.
Not everything has gone smoothly. The company is locked in a bruising legal battle with the Pentagon after refusing to remove safeguards that would have allowed Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance or lethal autonomous weapons, systems capable of killing without human authorisation. Reports that Claude has already been pressed into service for military operations, including missile strikes on Iran and the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, have added a surreal edge to the dispute.
Then came the Mythos affair. Anthropic’s decision to withhold its latest frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, over cybersecurity fears touched off a small geopolitical panic, rattling nerves about vulnerabilities in financial systems and critical infrastructure and prompting a personal call from vice-president JD Vance to the heads of leading AI firms. The episode forced the White House to soften its combative stance towards Anthropic, at least temporarily.
Anthropic is also making its presence felt in Washington in more conventional ways, pouring millions of dollars into lobbying and Super Pacs ahead of the US midterm elections. The firm has broken with much of the tech industry by calling for tougher government oversight of AI, putting it at odds with OpenAI and the broader libertarian wing of Silicon Valley.
The funding round is the latest proof that the gusher of money flowing into AI shows no sign of slowing, public scepticism and geopolitical turbulence notwithstanding. For Anthropic, the prize is now tantalisingly clear: a trillion-dollar valuation, an IPO that rewrites the record books and, perhaps most satisfyingly of all, the knowledge that the tortoise has caught the hare.