Anthropic beats Sam Altman's OpenAI to become world's most valuable AI startup

AI giant Anthropic has overtaken rival OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup after a blockbuster $65 billion Series H financing round which pushed the valuation to $965 billion. Anthropic’s increased validation surpassed OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation. According to a report by CNBC, the latest funding round by led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, nearly tripling Anthropic’s valuation from $380 billion in February. The financing also included $15 billion of previously committed investments, including $5 billion from Amazon.

Anthropic also reported a $47 billion revenue run rate, up from $30 billion earlier this year and $10 billion in 2025. Most part of this growth of Anthropic is driven by its popular AI coding assistant Claude Code, which has become the staple tool of many enterprises.

Anthropic released new models

Anthropic also released its latest AI model on May 28. The company introduced Claude Opus 4.8 along with Claude Mythos Preview, which is a cybersecurity-focused system available to some select companies. Anthropic CFO Krishan Rai said, “Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers… 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.”

Anthropic claims that Opus 4.8 is significantly better at flagging uncertainties in its own work and is much less likely to make unsupported claims. Meanwhile, Anthropic's internal evaluations found that the model is about four times less likely than its predecessor, Opus 4.7, to let flaws in its written code pass by unremarked. The model is also claimed to have outperformed its competitors on several key industry benchmarks, specifically excelling in financial analysis, reasoning and agentic coding.

Anthropic’s competition with OpenAI

Anthropic’s valuation now surpasses OpenAI’s $852 billion, achieved in March after its own record-breaking $122 billion funding round. Both companies are preparing for IPOs later this year, with OpenAI expected to file its confidential prospectus in the coming weeks.

Anthropic CEO jokingly 'admitted' the problem with company’s explosive growth
Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei jokingly acknowledged that his company’s explosive growth may be ‘too hard to handle’. According to a report by Business Insider, speaking at the Code with Claude developer conference in San Francisco along with co-founder Daniela Amodei, he revealed that Anthropic witnessed 80x year-over-year growth in revenue and usage in Q1 2026. Amodei also quipped that he would prefer a ‘mere 10x’ growth, since the current pace has stretched the computing resources of the company far beyond the original plan. Originally, Anthropic had expected anywhere from ‘a little’ growth to 10x, making the actual surge a logistical challenge.