Anthropic becomes the world's most valuable AI startup

Anthropic has completed a $65 billion funding round and is now valued at $965 billion. This more than doubles its valuation since February.

The latest funding is backed by a long list of investors. Included in the contribution are $15 billion in previously committed investments, including 5 billion dollars from Amazon. Storage and chip manufacturers Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix are also participating in the round as infrastructure partners. The latter companies, driven by high demand for AI memory, had only recently reached a stock market value of more than one trillion US dollars each.

The fresh capital is intended to advance research into the safety and interpretability of AI models, provide additional computing capacity for the growing demand for Claude, and support the expansion of products and partnerships, writes Anthropic.

Enterprise boom pushes Anthropic to capacity limits

The company has seen strong growth in its enterprise business in recent months. More and more companies are using Claude in their daily work, including with tools like Claude Code for software development.

In the last funding round in February, Anthropic was valued at $380 billion. The current valuation of $965 billion is therefore around 2.5 times higher than it was in February.

According to Anthropic, the company has now reached a revenue level that, extrapolated to one year, corresponds to more than $47 billion. This would be more than a fivefold increase compared to the beginning of the year.

The strong demand for Claude has recently made it clear that Anthropic is having difficulty providing enough computing power. The company had to throttle usage at times and distribute its capacities more selectively.

IPO draws closer

In addition to Anthropic's strong growth, the prospect of a possible IPO is likely to play a role in the size of the funding round and the significant investor interest. Reuters reports, citing investors and bankers, that Anthropic is preparing for a stock market listing that could take place as early as this year.

OpenAI is also reportedly being considered as a candidate for an upcoming IPO. In March, the company completed a record financing round of $122 billion, valuing it at $852 billion. Anthropic has now surpassed this mark with its new valuation of $965 billion.

The financing announcement coincided with the release of Claude Opus 4.8. According to Anthropic, the new top model is expected to improve in programming tasks and more clearly identify its uncertainties. At the same time, Anthropic announced that it will make models from the particularly powerful Mythos class available to all customers in the coming weeks.

(kbe)