Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI as the world's most valuable artificial intelligence startup after raising $65 billion in a new funding round that valued the company at $965 billion, marking one of the largest private fundraising rounds in technology history.
The funding round comes as the AI sector continues expanding rapidly amid intensifying global competition over advanced computing infrastructure, semiconductor supply chains and national AI development strategies tied to economic and military competition between the United States and China.
Anthropic said the Series H round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, Axios noted. The company said the new funding will be used to expand computing capacity, scale its Claude AI products and continue safety and interpretability research.
The new valuation places Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $730 billion in a previous funding round, according to Bloomberg.
Anthropic chief financial officer Krishna Rao said in a company statement that the funding would help it respond to growing demand for its AI products and maintain its research efforts.
"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," Rao said.
The company also disclosed that its annualized revenue run rate surpassed $47 billion earlier this month.
Part of the fundraising includes $15 billion in previously committed investments from hyperscale infrastructure partners, including $5 billion from Amazon, the report said. Amazon has become one of Anthropic's biggest backers as competition intensifies among major cloud providers seeking access to leading AI models.
The investment race has accelerated alongside broader tensions surrounding AI chips, semiconductor manufacturing and access to advanced computing resources. The United States has tightened export controls on advanced AI chips to China in recent years while companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta continue investing heavily in AI infrastructure.
Infrastructure partners participating in the round also included Micron Technology, which recently crossed a $1 trillion market valuation amid rising investor demand for memory chips and AI-related hardware.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, has positioned itself as a major rival to OpenAI with a focus on AI safety and enterprise services. Its Claude chatbot competes directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT as well as products from Google and Meta.
The company has expanded partnerships with large corporations and cloud providers during the past year as businesses increasingly integrate generative AI tools into internal operations.
The latest funding round also highlights the unprecedented scale of private investment flowing into AI development. Investors have continued backing leading AI firms despite concerns from regulators and researchers over safety risks, copyright disputes, misinformation and the growing energy demands tied to large-scale AI systems, according to reporting from Reuters.