Anthropic peaks OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable AI startup
Antropic, once a lesser-known AI competitor to OpenAI, has been on a relentless rise over the past few months.
The San Francisco company recently clashed with the Pentagon over the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. It released a powerful artificial intelligence model, Mythos, which it said is incredibly capable of finding and exploiting hidden bugs in software. And the company advised Pope Leo XIV. about his papal encyclical issued on Monday, in which he warned against protecting humanity from the most destructive effects of artificial intelligence.
On Thursday, Anthropic broke its ascension by officially passing OpenAI as the world’s top-flying AI startup. Anthropic said it has raised $65 billion in funding, valuing it at $900 billion before including new capital, a deal that puts it ahead of OpenAI’s last valuation of $730 billion. The company also unveiled a new flagship AI model, the Claude Opus 4.8, which is significantly better at generating computer code than its predecessor.
The new investment, led by investors including Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, valued Anthropic at nearly two and a half times its previous valuation of $380 billion three months ago.
The funding underscored the company’s success in developing artificial intelligence technology that excels at writing software code, which has turned into a robust business. Since Anthropic refined its AI coding technology in November, hundreds of businesses have signed up to pay for the software. The company said its “revenue rate,” which is its expected revenue for the year based on its current performance, topped $47 billion this month.
“This funding will help us meet the historic demand we’re experiencing, stay on the cutting edge of research, and bring Claude to more places where it’s being worked on,” he said Krishna Rao, CFO of Anthropic.
Anthropic’s trajectory stands out, even in the midst of the passionate AI frenzy. Just 62 days ago, OpenAI — which kicked off the AI boom with the release of chatbot ChatGPT in 2022 — announced it had raised $122 billion in a funding round that valued it at $730 billion, a figure it took roughly a decade to reach. Founded in 2021, Antropic beat that in half the time.
The company’s momentum gained momentum in recent months when Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, spoke about the potential dangers of AI and called for regulation of the technology. This led to a bitter battle with the Pentagon over how AI should be used in war, among other public nonsense.
Anthropic’s rise only adds to its competition with OpenAI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX as private companies race to go public.
Last week, SpaceX unveiled its public offering prospectus and is expected to go public as early as next month. OpenAI also plans to confidentially file for an initial public offering in the coming weeks. Anthropic insiders said the company is also considering an IPO that could come as early as this year, though the company declined to comment.
The battle is far from over. Facing pressure from Anthropic, OpenAI scaled back side projects in favor of prioritizing work on its own coding software called Codex. SpaceX recently struck a deal to buy Cursor, a software coding interface popular with developers, and agreed to sell some of its computing power to Anthropic.
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment. Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
In its latest funding, Antropic brought in new strategic investors including Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix, companies that build storage, memory and logic chips that are key to AI development. Anthropic said in a blog post that these strategic partners will help increase the company’s computing power as demand for Claude Code grows.
Anthropic has now raised more than $130 billion since its founding, according to PitchBook, which tracks startups. Its investors include 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 at vibecoding, which is when AI technologies create software in response to prompts written in conversational English. Opus 4.8 scored 10 percent higher than the previous Anthropic model in the vibecoding test by Vals AI, a company that tracks the performance of the latest AI technologies, said Rayan Krishnan, CEO of Vals AI.
The new model also outperformed its predecessor in mathematics, another area where leading AI technologies continue to improve by leaps and bounds.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of infringing news content related to AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied the claims.)