Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation on Thursday, overtaking OpenAI as the most valuable AI company in Silicon Valley. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, and nearly triples the $380 billion valuation Anthropic carried in February. OpenAI was last marked at $852 billion in late March after closing a $122 billion round, though a more recent secondary print pegged it at $730 billion.
The financing includes $15 billion of previously committed investments, among them $5 billion from Amazon. Anthropic said the proceeds will fund safety and interpretability research, expand compute capacity, and scale Claude products and partnerships. The company disclosed a $47 billion revenue run rate alongside the round, up from $30 billion earlier this year and $10 billion in annual revenue last year.
That growth curve is the load-bearing number behind the valuation. A 4.7x jump in run-rate revenue inside roughly twelve months puts Anthropic in rarefied territory for any private company, let alone one that competes with OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta on frontier model spend. The $965 billion mark prices the company at roughly 20 times current run-rate — aggressive, but in line with where the top end of the AI market has settled.
Key facts
- 01Anthropic closed a $65B Series H at a $965B post-money valuation, nearly tripling its $380B February mark.
- 02The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with $15B of previously committed investments including $5B from Amazon.
- 03Anthropic's run-rate revenue hit $47B, up from $30B earlier this year and $10B in annual revenue last year.
- 04The valuation puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, last marked at $852B in late March after a $122B round.
- 05Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 the same day and is preparing its own IPO behind the scenes.
Claude Code, Anthropic's coding assistant, has been the commercial engine. The product has pulled enterprise developer budgets that previously went to GitHub Copilot and to OpenAI's API, and it lands inside the workflows where AI spend converts most reliably to revenue. Anthropic also released Claude Opus 4.8 earlier on Thursday and has been previewing Claude Mythos Preview, a cybersecurity-focused model made available to a small group of customers.
CFO Krishna Rao framed the raise as a response to demand rather than a war chest for a new direction. The company is leaning into the products it already has rather than retooling — a contrast with OpenAI's expansion into ads, consumer hardware and self-serve tooling.
“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.”— Krishna Rao, Anthropic CFO
The financing lands in the middle of an IPO sprint at the top of the AI market. OpenAI is preparing to file its confidential IPO prospectus in the coming days or weeks and is targeting a public listing as soon as September. Elon Musk's SpaceX, which absorbed his AI startup SpaceXAI in February at a combined $1.25 trillion valuation, filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week. Anthropic is preparing its own IPO behind the scenes, though the timing remains fluid.
The investor syndicate also says something about where late-stage capital is going. Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia are all crossover funds with public-markets desks, and they are the natural buyers of pre-IPO stock at this scale. Their willingness to clear a $65 billion check at near-trillion-dollar pricing suggests the IPO window for the top frontier labs is being underwritten well before any S-1 hits the SEC.
Anthropic's lead over OpenAI on valuation is also narrower than the headline numbers suggest. OpenAI's secondary trades have ranged from $730 billion to $852 billion in the past two months, and a successful IPO at September timing could vault it above Anthropic again. Mistral, which is exploring designing its own chips as it scales infrastructure, and Meta — where Mark Zuckerberg said a cloud computing business is "definitely on the table" — round out a market where the top four players are now all building toward public-market access.
The risks are the ones the entire frontier cohort shares. Compute costs are still climbing faster than revenue at every lab, and the gap between run-rate revenue and gross margin remains the question no AI company has yet answered convincingly in public. A $47 billion run rate is a real business; it is not yet a profitable one, and Anthropic has not disclosed unit economics on Claude Code or its enterprise contracts. The Amazon relationship — a $5 billion check in this round on top of prior commitments — also concentrates customer, investor and infrastructure exposure in a single counterparty.
For the AI market, the more interesting signal is that the model layer is still where the largest dollars are clearing. Despite eighteen months of arguments that value would migrate to the application layer or to inference-optimized hardware, the two biggest private rounds of 2026 — Anthropic at $65 billion and OpenAI at $122 billion — both went to frontier labs. The crossover funds writing those checks are betting that the labs themselves capture the application-layer revenue, through products like Claude Code, rather than ceding it to a wrapper ecosystem. If that thesis holds, Anthropic's $965 billion is a floor, not a ceiling. If it doesn't, this round will be the one investors point to when the AI valuation cycle is studied later.
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