Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H on 28 May at a $965 billion post-money valuation, overtaking OpenAI to become the world's most valuable AI startup. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.
Once seen as the cautious, safety-focused sibling to OpenAI, the Claude maker has flipped the hierarchy on the back of enterprise demand for its coding tools. This is widely expected to be its final private raise before an IPO.
What went down?
Valuation nearly triples the $380bn Anthropic was worth in February.
Each lead investor reportedly committed more than $2bn.
Run-rate revenue crossed $47bn earlier in May.
Much of the raise loops back to Amazon and Google as compute spend.
An October IPO window has been floated in pre-IPO coverage.
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Why does it matter?
Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI over safety concerns, and now it sits above its former employer at $965 billion. The reversal reflects how decisively enterprise contracts, rather than consumer hype, are setting valuations in this market.
A near-trillion-dollar price tag on roughly $47bn of run-rate revenue puts Anthropic at around 20x sales. Investors are paying for momentum and the bet that Claude becomes embedded infrastructure across corporate workflows.
Our take
The headline number has a caveat: a meaningful slice of the $65 billion is previously committed capital from hyperscalers, and much of what Anthropic raises gets routed straight back to the same names as compute spend. Amazon and Google supply capital and receive vast infrastructure commitments in return. The incremental new money is smaller than the headline suggests. This is normal for the sector, not a warning sign, but it does mean the figure flatters the round.
Anthropic has shown that a research lab can win on enterprise reliability rather than consumer reach, and that coding assistants are now the commercial engine of frontier AI. If the IPO lands this year, the safety-first lab nobody expected to lead will be doing so on the public markets.
And another big thing… Pope Leo takes aim at AI
Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas on 25 May, a 42,300-word encyclical warning that AI risks replacing workers, accelerating war and exploiting the environment. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah delivered remarks alongside the pope at the Vatican launch, prompting critics to accuse the lab of "Vatican-washing": claiming moral cover while continuing to build the systems Leo is warning about.
