Anthropic raises $65 billion, tops OpenAI in AI valuation race

Anthropic’s $65 billion funding round vaulted the San Francisco artificial intelligence company to a valuation near $1 trillion, putting it ahead of OpenAI in the fiercest money race in the sector. The deal, announced Thursday, was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, and multiple reports pegged the post-money valuation at $965 billion, even as other accounts cited $900 billion.

The size of the bet suggests investors are buying into a different kind of A.I. winner. Anthropic has been positioning itself as the market leader in enterprise AI and coding, and it said its run-rate revenue had climbed above $30 billion in 2026, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. The company also said more than 1,000 business customers were each spending more than $1 million on an annualized basis, a sign that corporate demand for Claude is translating into real budgets rather than trial usage.

That commercial surge helps explain the pace of Anthropic’s financing. The company raised $13 billion in Series F funding at a $183 billion valuation on Sept. 2, 2025, then $30 billion in Series G funding at a $380 billion valuation on Feb. 12, 2026. Thursday’s round pushed that climb into a different league, underscoring how quickly capital is concentrating around the firms seen as closest to owning the frontier.

The valuation leap also reflects a brute-force reality of the A.I. business: scale now depends on access to massive compute. Anthropic announced a $50 billion U.S. computing infrastructure investment in November 2025, then expanded its collaboration with Amazon in April 2026 for up to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity. It has also deepened ties with Microsoft and Nvidia, signaling that the race at the top is being measured as much in power and chips as in product releases.

OpenAI remains the other giant in that race, but Anthropic’s latest round moves the comparison onto new ground. OpenAI said on March 31 that it closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion post-money valuation, after previously raising $110 billion at a $730 billion valuation in February. OpenAI has also said its foundation’s stake in OpenAI Group is worth more than $180 billion after the latest round.

For investors, Anthropic’s rise is a test of whether enterprise adoption, coding tools and compute access can build a stronger moat than consumer fame alone. The answer is now being priced in at a level that makes the A.I. contest not just a product race, but a referendum on which company can turn capital into durable power.