The San Francisco company also announced its new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4.
issued Friday, May 29, 2026 · 07:16 AM
[SAN FRANCISCO] Anthropic was once a little-known artificial intelligence competitor to OpenAI, but it has risen inexorably in recent months.
The San Francisco company recently fought with the Department of Defense over the use of AI in warfare. The company has released a powerful AI model, Mythos, which it says has the uncanny ability to find and exploit hidden flaws in software. And in a papal encyclical delivered on Monday (May 25), the company warned Pope Leo XIV about protecting humanity from the most destructive effects of AI.
On Thursday, Anthropic officially passed OpenAI as the world’s top flying AI startup, halting its rise. Anthropic announced that it has raised $65 billion in funding, giving it a valuation of $900 billion before incorporating new capital. This is a deal that exceeds OpenAI’s previous valuation of $730 billion. The company also announced Claude Opus 4.8, a new flagship AI model that is significantly better at generating computer code than its predecessor.
The new investment, led by investors including Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, boosts Anthropic’s value to nearly 2.5 times its previous valuation of US$380 billion about three months ago. The round was co-led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, Iconiq and XN. Key investors include Temasek and Jane Street.
This funding confirms the company’s success in developing AI technology that excels at writing software code, which has turned into a robust business. Since Anthropic refined its AI coding technology in November, hundreds of companies have signed up to pay for the software. The company announced that its “revenue run rate,” which is its expected revenue this year based on current performance, exceeded $47 billion this month.
“This funding will help us meet the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the forefront of research, and bring Claude to more research sites,” said Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao.
Amid all the excitement surrounding AI, Anthropic’s trajectory stands out. Just 62 days ago, OpenAI, which sparked the AI boom with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, announced that it had raised USD 122 billion in a funding round, valuing it at USD 730 billion. It took about 10 years to reach this number. Anthropic, founded in 2021, outperformed that in half the time.
The company has gained momentum in recent months as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei spoke out about the potential dangers of AI and called for regulation of the technology. This led to a fierce battle with the Pentagon over how AI should be used in wars and other situations.
As private companies compete to go public, Anthropic’s rise will only further intensify competition from OpenAI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
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SpaceX unveiled its initial public offering prospectus last week and is expected to list on the stock market as early as next month. OpenAI also plans to confidentially file for an initial public offering in the coming weeks. Anthropic insiders said the company is also considering an IPO, which could occur as early as this year, but the company declined to comment.
The battle isn’t over yet. Facing pressure from Anthropic, OpenAI has cut back on side projects in favor of work on its own coding software, called Codex. SpaceX recently signed a deal to acquire Cursor, a software coding interface popular with developers, and agreed to sell some computing power to Anthropic.
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment. Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
In its latest funding, Anthropic has brought in new strategic investors including Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, companies that make storage, memory, and logic chips critical to the development of AI. Anthropic said these strategic partners will help the company increase its computing capabilities as demand for Claude Code grows.
Anthropic has now raised more than $130 billion since its founding, according to PitchBook, which tracks startups. The investor roster includes technology giants like Amazon and Google, as well as Capital Group, Menlo Ventures, Iconiq Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Anthropic’s new Claude Opus 4.8 outperforms all other publicly available AI technologies at vibecoding, where the AI technology creates software in response to prompts written in conversational English. According to Rayan Krishnan, CEO of Vals AI, the Opus 4.8 scored 10% higher than previous Anthropic models on Vals AI’s Vibe Coding benchmark test, which tracks the performance of the latest AI technologies.
The new model also outperformed its predecessor in mathematics, another area where leading AI technologies continue to improve by leaps and bounds. new york times
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