Anthropic said Thursday it has raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, a deal that makes the company the most valuable artificial intelligence startup and puts it ahead of OpenAI’s March valuation of $852 billion.
The funding round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, and included $15 billion in earlier commitments from hyperscalers, including Amazon. The company said the new money comes as it races to go public before OpenAI, a competition now running alongside a sharp acceleration in revenue and product releases.
Anthropic said earlier this month that its annual revenue run rate had reached $47 billion. That followed an April update that put the figure above $30 billion, and a disclosure last year that the company’s annual run rate was $9 billion. The pace helps explain why investors have been willing to assign a valuation that now tops the biggest rival in the private market.
That surge has been tied largely to enterprise demand, especially for Claude Code, the company’s coding tool. Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s finance chief, said Claude is becoming increasingly indispensable to the company’s growing global customer base and that the firm is working to make tools such as Claude Code and Cowork more useful, more powerful and more adaptable to their needs.
Anthropic also used Thursday to debut Claude Opus 4.8. The company said the model outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro in several synthetic benchmarks focused on agentic coding, agentic financial analysis and agentic computer use, a pitch aimed squarely at the customers and developers now driving much of the sector’s spending.
The valuation milestone arrives with some baggage. President Trump previously said he would ban the use of Anthropic’s software across government agencies, and Dario Amodei has said he would not allow the Pentagon to use the company’s software for mass surveillance of Americans or to operate fully autonomous weapons. The company has also faced broader scrutiny over government use of its tools, even as Wall Street analysts have largely rewarded its more measured spending compared with OpenAI.
For now, the message from Anthropic is unmistakable: it is turning rapid enterprise adoption into one of the largest private-market bets in technology, while the fight over who gets to define the next phase of artificial intelligence is still very much on.
