Anthropic had a breakthrough moment this week as investors bet the startup has cornered the market by selling AI products to businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue.
AI Labs has kept a lower profile than rivals OpenAI, Google and Meta, which have focused on consumer products and instead pitched their models as tools for developers and enterprises.
This strategy has gained attention in recent days with the release of new software that has taken the public market by surprise. Anthropic also attracted attention with a Super Bowl ad targeting its rivals, which drew an awkward reaction from OpenAI head Sam Altman.
The five-year-old San Francisco group is making headlines as it finalizes a nearly $35 billion funding round at a $350 billion valuation and moves toward a major initial public offering this year.
Anthropic has grown from $1 billion in annualized revenue at the beginning of last year to more than $9 billion by the end of 2025. The company has been luring investors that it will reach annualized revenue of more than $30 billion by the end of this year and continue its steep trajectory from there, according to people familiar with the company’s finances.
Anthropic is seen as a safer long-term investment than OpenAI due to its strong enterprise traction, product focus and stable leadership, according to 12 investors who spoke to the FT.
“Anthropic is a well-run company with a simple capital structure,” said Mike Paulus, a billionaire and former partner at Andreessen Horowitz. His family office is backing the startup. “Emotions are shifting to the idea that this is where companies actually get paid for AI.”
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The San Francisco-headquartered startup was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers, including brothers Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, CEO and president, respectively.
Since then, the company has cultivated a calm, safety-minded image, reinforced by lengthy blog posts by its CEO warning about the dangers of unchecked AI.
Anthropic’s Claude Code tool for software engineering has become an industry leader since its launch a year ago. This system can read a company’s existing code, plan and execute tasks. This marks an early demonstration of “agent” capabilities that investors hope will open up a massive new market as AI models gain the ability to perform complex tasks independently.
This fascinated workers and gave rise to the term “claude bender” to refer to the marathon sessions of building websites and apps using the tool.
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“Anthropic wanted to build using Claude Code in-house. [but] They saw how good it was and aggressively commercialized it,” said Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures, who first invested in Anthropic in 2023.
Anthropic faces stiff competition from Google and OpenAI, which this week released an update to its own coding tool, Codex.
Investors in both Anthropic and OpenAI argued that both still have the potential to grow. “The magic around coding Anthropic is completely different from the magic at OpenAI around ChatGPT replacing search.”
Another OpenAI backer highlighted Anthropic’s small market share, saying, “Coding doesn’t equate to enterprises; it equates to developers.”
But investors in Anthropic’s ongoing funding round (which will include Nvidia, Microsoft, and top venture capital firms like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Altimeter Capital) are betting that the company’s tools will go even further to reinvent white-collar work.
“We took the view that AI is not ‘enterprise’ software in the traditional sense of chasing IT budgets. Artificial intelligence will capture labor costs and at some point take over human workflows end-to-end,” said Sebastian Dusterhoft, partner at Lightspeed.
The company wrote a $1 billion check to Anthropic last year, making it the company’s largest investment.
To further promote its benefits, Anthropic on Thursday released a powerful new model called Claude Opus 4.6, pioneering techniques for training models and managing interactions with applications and databases.
In recent days, the company has released a series of “plug-in” tools for specific industries, including legal, sales, finance, marketing, and customer support. On Friday, Goldman Sachs announced that it is working with Anthropic to develop AI agents that automate banking roles.
Those moves sparked a sell-off in the public markets this week, wiping out billions of dollars from data, enterprise software, advertising and publishing stocks.
“Anthropic’s story is very consistent: increased intelligence will give you greater market share. Until you know what that actually means, it feels very vague,” said Lilian Lee, an investment manager at Baillie Gifford who first backed Anthropic in 2025.
This week’s market reaction reflects a “moment of realization,” he added.
Lee and other investors emphasized that a startup’s mission-driven culture is critical to its success in attracting and retaining talent. “In most places, culture is an afterthought,” said one. “But to them it’s a religion, and over there they’re evangelical about their beliefs.”
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All seven of Anthropic’s co-founders will remain with the company. That stability gives it an advantage over OpenAI, which has seen eight of its 11-strong founding team leave since its founding in 2015, according to multiple investors. Mr. Altman himself was temporarily removed by the company’s board in 2023.
The company this week pledged not to introduce advertising into its products, distancing itself from rivals such as OpenAI, which has launched experimental advertising on ChatGPT in a bid to generate new revenue.
Anthropic plans to broadcast the decision through a series of tongue-in-cheek television ads scheduled to air during this weekend’s Super Bowl. The ad has a Dr. Dre track in the background with the lyrics, “What’s the difference between me and you? You talk good, but you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.”
Daniela Amodei insisted that they were not directed at other companies.
Before speaking on a technology podcast, Altman called the X ad “patently disingenuous” and “goes against the double-speak brand of humanity.” TBPN The war of words was a “sideshow.”
“People are excited about the food fight between companies, but I feel like the growing excitement around these models and the amazing features of these products and the Codex is far more important,” Altman said.
through data visualization clara murray
