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Anthropic Tops OpenAI at $965B in Record AI Round

 

Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding, eclipsing OpenAI's valuation and nearing $1 trillion as the world's most valuable private AI company.

 

 

Anthropic Closes $65 Billion Series H at $965 Billion Valuation

 

Anthropic raised $65 billion from investors at a $965 billion valuation in its latest funding round, overtaking OpenAI's most recent valuation as the two AI startups race to go public. The round marks what could be the AI startup's last private fundraising before debuting on the public markets.

 

The Series H round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. The round was co-led by Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN. Significant investors included AMP PBC, Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw Ventures, DST Global, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Insight Partners, Jane Street, Lightspeed Venture Partners, MGX, NTTVC, NX1 Capital, Situational Awareness LP, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Inc., and Temasek.

 

The round includes $15 billion of previously committed hyperscaler investments, including $5 billion from Amazon. Infrastructure partners, including Micron Technology, also contributed. Anthropic's strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix also joined the round.

 

Valuation Leapfrogs OpenAI After Three Months of Rapid Growth

 

The company leapfrogs OpenAI, whose latest funding round in February put the ChatGPT maker at $852 billion. Since February, when Anthropic completed its Series G round, its valuation has more than doubled from $380 billion.

 

In February, OpenAI announced it had closed a $110 billion round at an $840 billion post-money valuation, marking the largest raise ever, according to Crunchbase data. Anthropic's Series H now supersedes that milestone in post-money terms, positioning the company at the apex of the private AI sector by valuation.

 

Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao attributed the fundraising to intensifying commercial demand. "Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs," Rao said in a company blog post. "This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens."

 

Anthropic disclosed that its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month, with global enterprises across industries deploying Claude in their core operations.

 

Infrastructure Expansion Anchors Capital Deployment Plans

 

The latest funding is expected to advance Anthropic's safety and interpretability research, expand compute to meet growing demand for Claude, and scale the products and partnerships its customers rely on.

 

In recent weeks, Anthropic significantly expanded its compute footprint. The company signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of new capacity, with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, and with SpaceX for access to GPU capacity in Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.

 

Anthropic plans to use the proceeds to expand cloud infrastructure services, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The company confirmed AWS remains its primary cloud provider and training partner. Claude is now the first frontier model available on all three major cloud platforms: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

 

The financing structure itself reflects the strategic nature of the investor base. The $65 billion includes $15 billion of previously committed capital from hyperscalers, meaning roughly $50 billion was freshly committed in this round alone. Joining them are strategic infrastructure partners — Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix — whose technologies play a critical role in the world's supply of memory, storage, and logic chips.

 

Claude Opus 4.8 Launches Alongside Funding Announcement

 

The round came the same day that Anthropic released its new Claude Opus 4.8 model, which touts better capabilities in agentic tasks, advanced coding, and a focus on honesty and self-correction. Anthropic rolled out Opus 4.6 on February 5, then Opus 4.7 on April 16, and Opus 4.8 on May 28, reflecting an accelerating release cadence.

 

The momentum shift is also visible in user adoption. ChatGPT's share of global AI app downloads fell from 67% in Q2 2025 to 47% in Q2 2026, while Claude jumped from 1% to 14% over the same period, according to SensorTower data reported by Forbes. Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant, has been a major driver of enterprise adoption and revenue growth.

 

Anthropic is also reportedly planning to more widely launch models on par with its cybersecurity model Mythos, which it has only released in limited fashion due to potential safety concerns. The company has seen increased growth since its last funding round, particularly among enterprise customers that rely on Claude Code.

 

The private capital raise comes as the company prepares for a potential public listing, according to investors and bankers familiar with the matter. Anthropic and OpenAI are both considering entering the public markets, potentially as soon as this year, to gain access to the capital needed to acquire computing resources, support their services, and train new models.