Anthropic Closes In on a $30B Round at a $900B Valuation, Overtaking OpenAI as the World’s Most Valuable AI Startup

Anthropic is on the verge of closing a financing round of more than $30 billion at a post-money valuation above $900 billion, Bloomberg reported and the Financial Times corroborated, with the deal expected to land as soon as this week. At that price the maker of Claude vaults past OpenAI — last valued at $852 billion in March — to become, for the first time, the most valuable AI startup on the planet.

The round is co-led by Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Altimeter Capital and Greenoaks Capital Partners, each writing a check of roughly $2 billion, with existing backers including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and General Catalyst also participating. The scale rivals the $122 billion mega-round OpenAI closed earlier this year, and underscores how a handful of crossover funds are now underwriting the entire frontier-model race a couple of names at a time.

What is fuelling the markup is a revenue curve that has gone close to vertical. Anthropic is projecting roughly $10.9 billion in second-quarter revenue — more than double the prior quarter — and an annualized run rate expected to clear $50 billion by month’s end, up from about $4 billion as recently as last July. The company also expects to report its first profitable quarter ever, an unusual milestone for a lab still spending furiously on compute. CEO Dario Amodei has described “80 times growth in annualized revenue and usage” in the first quarter alone, while warning that the binding constraint is now securing enough computing capacity to keep up with demand.

That constraint is exactly where the new capital is headed. Anthropic has lined up a nearly $45 billion compute agreement tied to SpaceX’s Colossus cluster — which PixelMind covered when the deal first surfaced — a $1.8 billion cloud arrangement with Akamai, and ongoing chip and cloud commitments with Google. In practice, a $30 billion equity raise is less a war chest than a pass-through to the GPU and data-center suppliers that gate how fast a frontier lab can grow.

The symbolism is hard to miss. Within a single week the sector has seen Anthropic edge ahead of OpenAI on valuation, OpenAI move toward a public listing, and policymakers begin treating frontier models as critical infrastructure rather than experimental software. For a company that has spent years positioning safety as its differentiator, overtaking OpenAI on the one number Silicon Valley watches most closely is a milestone — and a reminder that the valuations of the two leading labs are now leapfrogging each other faster than either can ship a model.