Anthropic becomes world's most valuable AI startup with $65 billion funding round

Anthropic has become the world's most valuable AI startup after it raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round, catapulting the artificial intelligence firm to a post-money valuation of $965 billion, ahead of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

The funding round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with participation from a broad group of global investors, including Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ and XN, the company said in a statement on Thursday.

The round also includes $15 billion of previously committed investments from hyperscale cloud providers, including $5 billion from Amazon.

The funding milestone places Anthropic ahead of OpenAI in terms of valuation. According to Forbes, OpenAI raised $122 billion in March this year, valuing the company at about $852 billion on a post-investment basis.

Founded by former OpenAI executives, Anthropic has emerged as one of the leading developers of advanced AI models, competing directly with OpenAI, Google and other technology firms in the race to commercialise generative AI technologies.

The latest capital infusion comes as demand for Anthropic's flagship AI assistant Claude continues to surge among enterprises and individual users worldwide.

The company said its annualised revenue run rate crossed $47 billion earlier this month.

"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," Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said.

"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 added.

The company said the fresh funding will be used to advance AI safety and interpretability research, expand computing capacity and scale products and partnerships supporting Claude's growing user base.

Anthropic said it has signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of new capacity, with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, and with SpaceX for access to GPU capacity through Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.

Earlier this month, the San Francisco-based startup announced it would use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center, gaining access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs within a month.

“We are going to need to move a lot of atoms in order to keep up with AI demand, and there's nobody better at quickly moving atoms (on or off planet Earth),” Brown wrote, thanking SpaceX for the partnership.

Elon Musk responded on X saying he had spent time with senior members of the Anthropic team last week and was reassured by their approach to AI safety.

“Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing,” Musk wrote. “After that, I was ok leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic, as SpaceXAI had already moved training to Colossus 2.”

Musk, however, clarified on Thursday that SpaceX had only agreed to lease its Colossus AI training ‌data ⁠center ⁠clusters to Anthropic for six months, not multiple years as previously suggested.

"SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years, although it's ⁠possible that ‌may be what happens," Musk said in ⁠a post on X.