Anthropic has become the world’s most valuable private artificial intelligence (AI) company after raising money at prices that capitalise it at US$965 billion (A$1.3 trillion).
The company best known for developing the Claude AI assistants surpassed the $852 billion valuation of rival OpenAI when it raised $65 billion in its Series H funding round led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.
This represented a huge increase from the $380 billion valuation implied by a funding round just three months ago and underlines the desperate investor clamour for stocks leveraged to the boom in AI investment.
Anthropic said accelerating enterprise adoption of its Claude models and soaring demand for computing infrastructure underpinned the latest funding round.
“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,” Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said in an announcement.
The company said adoption of its Claude Code and Cowork tools had continued to grow across global enterprise customers since its Series G funding round in February, and its ‘run-rate’ revenue exceeded $47 billion earlier this month.
“This latest funding is expected to advance our safety and interpretability research, expand compute to meet growing demand for Claude, and scale the products and partnerships our customers rely on,” Rao said.
Anthropic is also on track to more than double second-quarter revenue to US$10.9 billion and could achieve its first operating profit this year, according to a Wall Street Journal article.
Significant investors in the latest funding round also 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 Investment Management, Inc. and Temasek.
Anthropic said these investors were also being joined by strategic infrastructure partners Micron Technology, Samsung and SK Hynix, whose technologies play a critical role in the world's supply of memory, storage, and logic chips.
Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to come to the public markets via initial public offers in the next year.
