Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, announced on Thursday that it had raised $65 billion in fresh funding, giving the firm a post-money valuation of $965 billion.
The milestone makes Anthropic the world’s most valuable AI startup, surpassing rival OpenAI.
The funding round caps a remarkable growth trajectory for Anthropic, which was once viewed as a smaller contender in the global AI race.
Strong adoption of its products by major enterprises, particularly after the launch of advanced coding assistants late last year, has helped propel the company into a leading position within the industry.
Anthropic’s new valuation underscores a significant shift in the AI landscape, reflecting the growing commercial and cultural influence of its Claude platform.
The deal is also expected to have broader implications for the technology sector, particularly as investors closely watch a wave of high-profile initial public offerings expected this year, including those involving rivals OpenAI and SpaceX.
The company said the funding round, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, validates both the strength of its AI models and its long-term vision for the future of artificial intelligence.
“Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs,” Krishna Rao, chief financial officer of Anthropic, said in a blogpost.
Beyond focusing more heavily on enterprise and coding-related services than some consumer-oriented rivals, Anthropic has positioned itself as a company that prioritises AI safety.
Earlier this month, one of the firm’s co-founders attended the release of a more than 43,000-word encyclical by Pope Leo XIV, which cautioned against the risks posed by artificial intelligence and called for stronger oversight of the technology.
Anthropic is also engaged in an ongoing legal dispute with the United States Department of Defense after declining earlier this year to remove safeguards that restrict Claude from being used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons systems capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention.
