Anthropic tops OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable AI startup

[SAN FRANCISCO] Anthropic, once the lesser-known artificial intelligence competitor to OpenAI, has been on an inexorable rise over the past few months.

The San Francisco company recently duelled with the Pentagon over the use of AI in warfare. It released a powerful AI model, Mythos, that it said was uncannily capable of finding and exploiting hidden flaws in software. And the company advised Pope Leo XIV on his papal encyclical delivered on Monday (May 25), in which he warned about safeguarding humanity from AI’s most disruptive effects.

On Thursday, Anthropic punctuated its ascent by officially passing OpenAI as the world’s highest flying AI startup. Anthropic said that it had raised US$65 billion in financing that values it at US$900 billion before the inclusion of the new capital, a deal that puts it ahead of OpenAI’s last valuation of US$730 billion. The company also unveiled a new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4.8, which is significantly better than its predecessor at generating computer code.

The new investment, which was led by investors including Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, boosted Anthropic’s value to nearly 2½ times its previous valuation of US$380 billion about three months ago. The round was co-led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, Iconiq and XN. Significant investors included Temasek and Jane Street.

The funding underlined the company’s success in developing AI technology that excels in writing software code, which has turned into a robust business. Since Anthropic improved its AI coding technology in November, hundreds of businesses have signed up to pay for the software. The company said that its “revenue run rate”, which is its expected revenue for the year based on its current performance, crossed US$47 billion this month.

“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,” said Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer.

Anthropic’s trajectory stands out, even amid a heated frenzy over AI. Just 62 days ago, OpenAI – which had kicked off the AI boom with its release of the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022 – announced it had raised US$122 billion in a funding round that put its value at US$730 billion, a number that it took roughly a decade to achieve. Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, has surpassed that in half the time.

The company’s momentum has gathered steam in recent months as Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, has spoken out about the potential dangers of AI and called for regulation of the technology. That led to a bitter fight with the Pentagon over how AI should be used in warfare, among other public imbroglios.

Anthropic’s rise only adds to its contest with OpenAI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX as the private companies race to go public.

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Last week, SpaceX revealed its public offering prospectus and is expected to reach the stock market as soon as next month. OpenAI also plans to file confidentially for an initial public offering in the coming weeks. Anthropic insiders have said that the company was also considering an IPO that could come as soon as this year, though the company has declined to comment.

The battle is far from over. Facing pressure from Anthropic, OpenAI has trimmed side projects in favour of prioritising work on its own coding software, called Codex. SpaceX recently entered an agreement to buy Cursor, a software coding interface popular with developers, and has agreed to sell some computing power to Anthropic.

A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

In its latest funding, Anthropic brought in new strategic investors, including Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix, companies that build storage, memory and logic chips that are crucial to the development of AI. Anthropic said that these strategic partners would help boost the company’s computing power as demand for Claude Code grew.

Anthropic has now raised more than US$130 billion since it was established, according to PitchBook, which tracks startups. Its roster of investors includes Capital Group, Menlo Ventures, Iconiq Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as tech giants such as Amazon and Google.

Anthropic’s new Claude Opus 4.8 outperforms all other publicly available AI technologies on vibe coding, which is when AI technologies create software in response to prompts written in conversational English. Opus 4.8 scored 10 per cent higher on the vibe coding benchmark test from Vals AI, a company that tracks the performance of the latest AI technologies, compared with the previous Anthropic model, said Rayan Krishnan, the CEO of Vals AI.

The new model also outperformed its predecessor in mathematics, another area where the leading AI technologies continue to improve by leaps and bounds. NYTIMES