Anthropic could reach a valuation of over $900 billion, surpassing OpenAI

Anthropic is on the verge of completing a financing round exceeding 30 billion dollars, with a valuation expected to surpass 900 billion dollars, overtaking its competitor OpenAI, and becoming the world's most valuable artificial intelligence startup. According to media reports, Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Altimeter Capital, and Greenoaks Capital Partners are expected to jointly lead this round of financing, with each party planning to invest about 2 billion dollars, aimed to be completed by next week at the earliest. Existing investors such as Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and General Catalyst also plan to participate in the follow-on investment.

The speed at which the negotiations for this round of financing have advanced is eye-catching in the market. According to reports, Anthropic only began evaluating whether to initiate a new round of financing at the end of April this year and officially started contacting investors at the beginning of this month. Within weeks, it achieved oversubscription, with the current subscription total exceeding the target limit of 30 billion dollars; the final terms are still being finalized.

Strong fundamentals underpin this round of astronomical financing. Anthropic expects second-quarter revenue to reach 10.9 billion dollars, more than doubling from the previous quarter and is expected to achieve its first profitable quarter. The company's annualized revenue run rate is expected to exceed 50 billion dollars by the end of next month, up from 4 billion dollars in July last year, increasing more than tenfold in less than a year. At an industry conference held this month, CEO Dario Amodei stated that the company achieved an "80-fold increase" in annualized revenue and usage in the first quarter of this year.

To meet the sharply rising demand for computing power, Anthropic has launched several major infrastructure deployments, signing a nearly 45 billion dollar cooperation agreement with SpaceX, an 18 billion dollar agreement with Akamai Technologies, and purchasing chips and cloud services from Google. Notably, Anthropic is turning some of its suppliers into financing partners: Google recently promised to add an investment of 10 billion dollars and pledged to further invest up to an additional 30 billion dollars if Anthropic achieves specific performance targets; Amazon previously also indicated it would invest 5 billion dollars and plans to add another 20 billion dollars over time.

Following the completion of this round of financing, Anthropic's valuation will surpass the 852 billion dollars established by OpenAI's financing in March this year, making it the leader among global AI unicorns. OpenAI is currently expected to submit its draft initial public offering application confidentially in the coming days, and Anthropic is also considered one of the candidates to go public as early as this fall. Once both companies initiate the IPO process, the valuation established in this round of financing will become an important benchmark and may further reshape the market's pricing logic for the overall value of the AI track.