Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI as the world's most valuable AI startup after raising $65 billion in its latest funding round. The fresh funding took Anthropic's valuation to around $965 billion, close to the $1 trillion mark.
"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," said Anthropic chief financial officer Krishna Rao, according to Euro News.
Anthropic also said its AI chatbot Claude has become the first advanced AI model to be available on all three major global cloud platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Anthropic's revenue has surged due to strong demand for its Claude Code. The company said its revenue run rate has now reached $47 billion, up from $30 billion earlier this year and $10 billion in annual revenue last year.
OpenAI had said in March that it was moving toward a valuation of $852 billion after raising $122 billion from investors. But Anthropic's latest funding round has now led its valuation even higher. After the latest investment round, called Series H, its valuation has nearly tripled in just a few months. The company is best known for Claude, its AI chatbot that competes with ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, SpaceX, Elon Musk's space company, was valued at $800 billion last year. Its valuation later jumped to about $1.25 trillion after it merged with Musk's AI company xAI in February when Anthropic was valued at $380 billion.
Big investment firms such as Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital led the investment round. Anthropic said the financing includes $15 billion in investments that had already been promised earlier. This includes $5 billion from Amazon, which is one of Anthropic's biggest backers.
Anthropic also launched a new AI model called Claude Opus 4.8 on Thursday. The company said this version is better at coding, writing and handling professional office work compared to its older AI models. It is also trying to compete more aggressively with OpenAI.