Anthropic has arrived with the latest entrant to the AI race and fresh funding.
On Thursday, AI Labs announced $65 billion in new funding, giving it a staggering $965 billion valuation, making it the most valuable AI startup, surpassing rival OpenAI.
On the same day, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8, a new version of its general-purpose large-scale language model. Anthropic called it a “modest but visible improvement over its predecessor” and said it excels at coding, reasoning, and general knowledge tasks.
The new model is the latest in a series of salvos as Anthropic is in the midst of a high-stakes battle with OpenAI for technological superiority and market share. The labs are preparing to go public, pushing to sell their coding tools to as many developers as possible, and working to secure enough computing power to sustain growth.
In a post about the funding, Anthropic said the new funding will help it “expand its compute to meet growing demand for Claude,” among other efforts.
Anthropic’s latest valuation is a significant increase from February’s $380 billion valuation. OpenAI’s last funding in March valued the company at $852 billion. The last model, GPT-5.5, was released in April.
New features in Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 model
Anthropic chose this model release to launch their new “Effort Control.” This allows users to toggle between settings for how much computing power the model spends on answers. Businesses are starting to consider spending on AI, and this tool can help engineers use their Claude code budgets more slowly, for example.
Opus 4.8’s high-speed mode is three times cheaper than previous versions of Anthropic models, giving customers another way to reduce costs, the company wrote.
Opus 4.8 is not the long-awaited Mythos model that Anthropic had put on hold due to cybersecurity concerns.
Anthropic caused a worrying stir in the cybersecurity community in April when it announced that Mythos was far better than past models at finding vulnerabilities to hack. In developing the Mythos guardrails, the company said it has worked with trusted companies and organizations, particularly in the cybersecurity field.
“We are moving quickly to develop these safety devices and expect to have Mythos-class models available to all customers in the coming weeks,” Thursday’s announcement said.
Anthropic called the new Opus 4.8 model “weaker” than the Mythos and said it was “significantly behind” the unreleased model in terms of cyber capabilities. The company also wrote that while Mythos always admits it’s an AI, Opus 4.8 can be fooled into saying it’s human in about 3% of tests.
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