Anthropic closes $30 billion round, overtakes OpenAI in valuation

Anthropic is closing a funding round of more than $30 billion at a valuation above $900 billion, passing OpenAI to become the most valuable startup in the history of the AI industry. The round is expected to close next week. It reflects a shift of power in the race to build large language models.

Anthropic soars past OpenAI

A valuation above $900 billion is an extraordinary result for a company founded in 2021. Just five years ago, Anthropic was a young lab with an ambitious idea: build AI that is safer and easier to control. It has since grown into a startup worth nearly a trillion dollars.

That makes Anthropic the most valuable AI startup in the world, ahead of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. For context, investors valued OpenAI at about $80 billion in its last round. Anthropic's valuation, more than ten times higher, shows the market is ready to pay enormous sums for companies with competitive technology and a growing market share.

How Anthropic grew

The company was founded in 2021 by a group of researchers, including Daria Abramova and Tom Brown, who left OpenAI and set up the new project. From the start, Anthropic positioned itself not as a copy of its competitors but as an alternative focused on the safety and interpretability of AI models, that is, on how neural networks work and how to control them.

The strategy paid off. Claude, Anthropic's flagship model, won loyalty among developers, startups and enterprise customers. Over 2024-2025, the company raised funding from Google, Amazon, Salesforce and other giants. Each new round valued it higher, turning a young startup into one of the key players in the AI market.

Where the $30 billion is going

The investment is directed at three critical areas:

• Computing infrastructure — GPUs, servers and data centers for training models and deploying them in production
• Research and development — hiring top AI researchers and engineers from around the world
• Scaling operations — growing teams, launching new products and expanding globally

The AI race resembles the Cold War arms race. OpenAI, Google, Meta and other major players are already spending many billions on computing capacity. Without this funding, Anthropic would be forced to fall behind in the pace of model development and in the capacity to serve growing demand from enterprise customers.

What this means

Anthropic's result shows that investors are willing to bet tens of billions on startups that demonstrate technological superiority and capture new market niches. Such valuations stimulate innovation and sharper competition, which should ultimately lead to better products and lower prices for users.

At the same time, it puts enormous pressure on Anthropic itself. With this market capitalization, the company must deliver results and meet investor expectations. Any mistake in strategy, technology or execution could be extremely costly. The next 2-3 years will show whether such an aggressive revaluation of the startup is justified.

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