Anthropic, once a lesser-known artificial intelligence competitor to OpenAI, has been growing steadily over the past few months.
The San Francisco company recently dueled with the Pentagon over the use of AI in warfare. It released a powerful AI model, Mythos, which it said is highly capable of finding and exploiting hidden flaws in software. And the company advised Pope Leo XIV in his papal encyclical delivered on Monday, in which he warned about protecting humanity from the most disruptive effects of AI.
On Thursday, Anthropic capped its progress by officially passing OpenAI as the world’s highest-flying AI start-up. Anthropic said it has raised $65 billion in funding, valuing it at $900 billion before adding new capital, a deal that puts it ahead of OpenAI’s last valuation of $730 billion. The company also unveiled a new flagship AI model, Cloud Opus 4.8, which is significantly better than its predecessor at generating computer code.
The new investment, led by investors including Green Oaks Capital, Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, boosted Anthropic’s value to nearly two and a half times its previous valuation of $380 billion three months ago.
The funding highlights the company’s success in developing AI technology that excels at writing software code, which has turned into a strong business. Since Anthropic improved its AI coding technology in November, hundreds of businesses have signed up to pay for the software. The company said its “revenue run rate,” which is its expected revenue for the year based on its current performance, surpassed $47 billion this month.
“This funding will help us meet the historic demand we are experiencing, continue to be on the research frontier, and bring the cloud to more places where work happens,” said Krishna Rao, chief financial officer of Anthropic.
Anthropic’s trajectory also stands out amid the heated frenzy over AI, as just 62 days ago, OpenAI — which fueled the AI boom with the release of the ChatGPAT chatbot in 2022 — announced it had raised $122 billion in funding, valuing it at $730 billion, a number it took it nearly a decade to achieve. Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, has overtaken it in half the time.
The company’s momentum has accelerated in recent months as Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei has spoken out about the potential dangers of AI and called for regulation of the technology. This led to a bitter battle with the Pentagon over how AI should be used in warfare, among other public entanglements.
Anthropic’s rise only increases the competition between them, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX as private companies race to go public.
Last week, SpaceX revealed its public offering prospectus and is expected to hit the stock market next month. OpenAI also plans to confidentially file for an initial public offering in the coming weeks. Anthropic insiders have said the company is also considering an IPO that could come as soon as this year, though the company declined to comment.
In its latest funding, Anthropic brought on new strategic investors including Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix, companies that make storage, memory and logic chips that are critical to the development of AI. In a blog post, Anthropic said these strategic partners will help boost the company’s computing power as demand for cloud code grows.
According to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups, Anthropic has raised more than $130 billion since its founding. Its list of investors includes companies like Capital Group, Menlo Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as tech giants like Amazon and Google.
Anthropic’s new Cloud Opus 4.8 outperforms all other publicly available AI technologies on vibe coding, which is when AI technologies create software in response to prompts written in conversational English. Opus 4.8 scored 10 percent higher on the Vibe coding benchmark test from Walls AI, a company that tracks the performance of the latest AI technologies, than the previous Anthropic model, said Ryan Krishnan, chief executive of Walls AI.
The new model also outperformed its predecessor in mathematics, another area where leading AI technologies continue to improve rapidly.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to the AI system. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
