(Zero Hedge)—Amid an unprecedented valuation battle between ChatGPT and Anthropic raging in the private markets ahead of their respective IPOs in a few months, Bloomberg reported that shortly after releasing its latest Claude Opus 4.8, Anthropic raised $65BN in a funding round that will nearly triple the start-up’s valuation and see it surpass arch-rival OpenAI as the most valuable AI lab.
The Claude chatbot maker was valued at $900bn, not including the new investment, as part of the fundraising led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.
The round comes just three months after Anthropic raised $30bn in a deal valuing it at $350bn as the popularity of its tools for software developers and workplace customers has propelled extraordinary growth and given it an edge over OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $852bn.
“Claude’s latest advancements have driven large-scale adoption among the world’s most demanding organisations. This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation,” said Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital.
While Anthropic’s run-rate revenue, a metric preferred by start-ups which estimates annual revenues based on short-term performance, crossed $47bn this month, some have expressed skepticism that the number is legitimate, with many suggesting that double counting and even extrapolating of outlier is the reason behind the surge.
The more than fivefold increase since the start of the year is unprecedented for a start-up its size. It’s also most likely bogus, but that will be for the company’s new public shareholders to figure out in a few months when the company goes public at an even more ludicrous valuation.
According to the FT, backers are looking to build their stakes in Anthropic ahead of an initial public offering which could come as soon as this year, as OpenAI and SpaceX also race towards public listings. Together, the three companies are expected to have a valuation of ~$3 trillion and will drain an unprecedented amount of liquidity from the market, likely sparking the next market drawdown.
The funding caps an extraordinary period for Anthropic, led by former ChatGPT employee Dario Amodei, when the announcement of its new AI tools has rattled whole sectors of the stock market from wealth managers to cyber security groups.
The power of its Mythos model, which it released to a limited group of trusted partners because of its advanced cyber security capabilities, has prompted concern from governments and financial regulators around the world. On Thursday, Anthropic said it was making progress towards a wider release of Mythos “in the coming weeks”. It also released the latest version of its Claude model, Opus 4.8, which the company said was more “honest” and “more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims”.
The company is also embroiled in a legal fight with the Department of Defense over the military use of its technology, a battle that has scarcely dented Anthropic’s financial progress.
The new funding includes investments from the three leading makers of memory chips: Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix. Anthropic is an end customer for their hardware, which has increasingly been in short supply because of huge demand from AI data centres.
Their participation follows other circular agreements by both OpenAI and Anthropic with cloud providers and other chipmakers, such as Nvidia.
These circle-jerking arrangements between customers, suppliers and investors – reminiscent of the circular deals that burst the dot com bubble – in the AI industry have added to concerns about a bubble in the sector. Anthropic initially targeted a $30bn raise from financial institutions. The company exceeded that total in part thanks to the participation of infrastructure partners, the same infrastructure partners that will now see their money returned to them for compute purchases.
This added to $15bn in previously committed funding from Big Tech “hyperscalers”, including $5bn from Amazon, to fill out the $65bn raising.
The new capital will go towards Anthropic’s effort to procure enough computing power to meet rising demand for its tools. It has struggled with capacity issues in recent months.
It recently struck a multibillion-dollar deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use one of its data centres, as well as long-term agreements with Google, Broadcom and Amazon potentially totalling hundreds of billions of dollars.
“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, chief financial officer of Anthropic.
Other venture capital and fund managers who invested include Baillie Gifford, Blackstone and Brookfield and state-backed investors including Abu Dhabi’s MGX and Singapore’s Temasek.
