The pure-play AI crown changes hands
Anthropic has become the most valuable pure-play AI company in the world after a historic US$65bn Series H round lifted its post-money valuation to US$965bn - clearing the US$852bn at which rival OpenAI was most recently valued. It's a notable moment in a tightening race, with both companies preparing to go public later in the year.
Inside the round
- The financing was led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia, with participation from Capital Group, Coatue, GIC, ICONIQ, Temasek, and Blackstone.
- It also folds in US$15bn of previously committed hyperscaler investment, including US$5bn from Amazon.
- Anthropic says the cash will help it serve surging demand, stay at the research frontier, and deepen safety and interpretability work.
Why the valuation holds together
The justification leans on revenue and customer mix. Anthropic points to an annualized revenue run rate crossing US$47bn, evidence that enterprises are embedding Claude into core workflows and tools like Claude Code and Cowork. To feed that demand it has rapidly expanded compute through agreements with Amazon, Google, Broadcom, and SpaceX - including up to 5 GW from Amazon, 5 GW of TPU capacity via Google and Broadcom, and GPU capacity inside SpaceX's Colossus clusters - with Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix joining on the supply side. It's also the first frontier model available simultaneously on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
The profitability gap that sets it apart
The most striking contrast with OpenAI is financial trajectory. Per reporting cited in the piece, OpenAI is projected to lose around US$74bn in 2028, while Anthropic is on course for roughly US$17bn in profit that year. The likely reason is customer mix: about 85% of Anthropic's revenue comes from enterprise and developer customers - who pay far more per token - whereas a similar share of OpenAI's comes from consumers, most of whom don't pay at all. With eight of the Fortune 10 as customers, Anthropic has become the first company to approach a US$1tn valuation in a formal private round.