Anthropic Completes $6.5 Billion Funding Round, Valuation Reaches $96.5 Billion Surpassing OpenAI

Bloomberg reported that the developer of the large language model Claude, Anthropic, recently completed a $65 billion fundraising round, valuing the company at $965 billion, surpassing its competitor OpenAI's valuation of $852 billion.

This round of funding was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, while the company was valued at only $35 billion three months ago.

The Financial Times revealed that investors are rushing to establish positions before the initial public offerings of Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX this year. The combined market value of these three companies is estimated to reach $3 trillion, potentially siphoning off a significant amount of market liquidity. Currently, Anthropic's annualized run rate revenue exceeded $47 billion this month, more than five times its value at the beginning of the year, but the market questions whether there is double counting.

On the business front, the company has released the Claude Opus 4.8 model and plans to expand the scope of the Mythos model, which involves advanced cybersecurity. Led by former ChatGPT employee Dario Amodei, Anthropic is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Defense over the military use of its technology, and its new tools have impacted stock sectors such as wealth management and cybersecurity.

This round of funding includes cross-shareholdings from chipmakers like Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix, as well as the previously committed $15 billion from tech giants. This cyclical transaction pattern, where customers, suppliers, and investors overlap, has raised industry concerns about a repeat of the internet bubble. Currently, Anthropic has signed a data center agreement with Elon Musk's SpaceX and has reached long-term computing capacity contracts with Google, Broadcom, and Amazon.