Anthropic Tops OpenAI to Become the World’s Most Valuable A.I. Start-Up

Anthropic, once the lesser-known artificial intelligence competitor to OpenAI, has been on an inexorable rise over the past few months.

The San Francisco company recently dueled with the Pentagon over the use of A.I. in warfare. It released a powerful A.I. model, Mythos, that it said was uncannily capable of finding and exploiting hidden flaws in software. And the company advised Pope Leo XIV on his papal encyclical delivered on Monday, in which he warned about safeguarding humanity from A.I.’s most disruptive effects.

On Thursday, Anthropic punctuated its ascent by officially passing OpenAI as the world’s highest flying A.I. start-up. Anthropic said it had raised $65 billion in financing that values it at $900 billion before the inclusion of the new capital, a deal that puts it ahead of OpenAI’s last valuation of $730 billion. The company also unveiled a new flagship A.I. model, Claude Opus 4.8, which is significantly better than its predecessor at generating computer code.

The new investment, which was led by investors including Green Oaks Capital, Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, boosted Anthropic’s value by nearly two and a half times its previous valuation of $380 billion about three months ago.

The funding underlined the company’s success in developing A.I. technology that excels in writing software code, which has turned into a robust business. Since Anthropic improved its A.I. 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, crossed $47 billion this month.

“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,” said Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer.