Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI as World's Most Valuable AI Startup at $900B

Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI to claim the title of the world's most valuable AI startup, closing a $65 billion funding round that values the company at $900 billion — well ahead of OpenAI's last valuation of $730 billion. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital, and Dragoneer Investment Group, and also brought in strategic chip partners Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. The deal represents a staggering 2.4x jump from Anthropic's previous valuation of $380 billion just three months ago.

The speed of Anthropic's ascent is striking even by AI industry standards. OpenAI — which sparked the modern AI boom with ChatGPT in 2022 — took roughly a decade to hit a $730 billion valuation, announced just 62 days before this deal. Anthropic, founded in 2021, blew past that mark in roughly half the time. The company has now raised more than $130 billion in total since its founding, according to PitchBook.

The financial rocket fuel comes largely from Anthropic's dominance in AI-assisted software coding. Since upgrading its coding technology in November, hundreds of businesses have signed up as paying customers. The company's annualized revenue run rate crossed $47 billion this month. Its newest flagship model, Claude Opus 4.8, scored 10% higher than its predecessor on a vibe-coding benchmark tracked by Vals AI — outperforming all other publicly available models on the metric. The model also showed significant gains in mathematics.

Beyond the financials, Anthropic has become a prominent voice in AI policy debates. CEO Dario Amodei has publicly pushed for AI regulation and clashed with the Pentagon over military AI applications. The company also reportedly advised Pope Leo XIV ahead of his papal encyclical issued Monday, which warned about protecting humanity from AI's most disruptive effects. Anthropic also released a separate model called Mythos, described as unusually capable at identifying and exploiting hidden software vulnerabilities.

The funding intensifies a three-way race to the public markets among Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX. SpaceX filed its IPO prospectus last week and could list as soon as next month. OpenAI plans to file confidentially for an IPO in coming weeks. Anthropic insiders have floated a potential IPO as early as this year, though the company has not confirmed plans.