Anthropic has completed the largest AI funding round in history, with its valuation surpassing that of its rival OpenAI for the first time.

On May 28, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic raised $65 billion in its latest funding round, elevating its post-money valuation to $965 billion. This surpasses the $852 billion valuation OpenAI established following its own funding round in March, making Anthropic the world's highest-valued AI startup. Based on projected annualized revenue exceeding $50 billion, the current valuation implies a price-to-sales (PS) ratio of approximately 18 to 19 times, reflecting the capital market's intense enthusiasm for leading AI assets.

Financially, Anthropic is projected to achieve $10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter, more than doubling from the previous quarter, and is expected to record its first profitable quarter. The company stated its annualized revenue is on track to surpass $50 billion by the end of next month—a stark increase from just $4 billion in July last year. This explosive growth trajectory provides fundamental support for the high valuation and enabled institutional investors to complete this substantial funding round within weeks.

Concurrently, both Anthropic and OpenAI have placed initial public offerings (IPOs) on their agendas. OpenAI is expected to confidentially file its draft registration statement for an IPO within days to weeks, while Anthropic could seek a public listing as early as this autumn. Analysts suggest that which company reaches the public markets first may become the next critical milestone in the AI race.

Rapidly Finalized Funding Reflects Strong Investor Demand The swift completion of this funding round within weeks highlights the market's fervent appetite for top-tier AI companies.

The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, with each lead investor contributing over $2 billion. Other participating institutions included D.E. Shaw & Co., Blackstone Inc., and DST Global.

Notably, Google, under its parent company Alphabet, invested several billion dollars as part of a previously announced long-term commitment of up to $40 billion. Amazon invested $5 billion, also a continuation of a prior commitment.

Additionally, Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix participated in the round, with undisclosed investment amounts, ultimately helping the total raise exceed Anthropic's initial target of $30 billion.

After receiving multiple unsolicited funding proposals in late April, Anthropic began evaluating whether to initiate a new round at a valuation exceeding $900 billion and entered into advanced negotiations earlier this month. The process, from initiation to completion, took only weeks, demonstrating strong institutional investor interest.

Revenue Growth at an Unprecedented Pace in Software History Anthropic's accelerating financial performance provides a fundamental basis for its high valuation.

The company's projected Q2 revenue of $10.9 billion represents more than a doubling from the prior quarter, indicating sustained expansion in enterprise demand for its AI software. The anticipated first quarterly profit marks a maturation of its business model.

According to a recent report from semiconductor and AI infrastructure research firm SemiAnalysis, Anthropic's annualized run rate (ARR) has surpassed $44 billion. This is a nearly fivefold increase from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025, implying the company was adding roughly $96 million in new ARR daily over a short period. A venture capitalist who reviewed Anthropic's data stated, "We have studied over 200 software company IPOs, and we have never seen growth at this pace."

According to CEO Dario Amodei, Anthropic's revenue has grown approximately tenfold annually since its first revenue: ARR was around $10 million in 2022, $100 million in 2023, $1 billion in December 2024, $7 billion in September 2025, $9 billion in December 2025, $14 billion in February 2026, $19 billion in March 2026, $30 billion in April 2026, and over $44 billion by May 2026.

Claude Code: A Key Driver of Accelerated Growth A primary driver of this growth surge is the strong performance of the programming agent product, Claude Code.

Launched publicly in May 2025, Claude Code's ARR reached $2.5 billion by February 2026 and has continued to climb. Since January 2026, its weekly active users have doubled. Analysis estimates that approximately 4% of global GitHub public commits are now generated or assisted by Claude Code, with enterprise usage contributing over half of its revenue.

Claude Code's strategic value lies in its ability to bridge the conversion path from individual users to enterprise procurement. Individual developers first use Claude Code for daily programming tasks; the tool then integrates into team codebases, eventually triggering company-wide unified procurement, permission configuration, and secure compliance integration. This transforms individual usage habits into organizational processes, creating a natural penetration from consumer to business.

At the enterprise level, the SemiAnalysis report indicates that 8 out of the Fortune 10 are now Claude customers. The number of enterprise customers spending over $1 million annually has grown from a dozen two years ago to over a thousand. The number of customers spending over $100,000 annually has increased sevenfold in the past year. Regarding market share, Anthropic's portion of enterprise AI spending relative to OpenAI has risen from about 10% in early 2025 to over 65% by February 2026.

Gross Margin Leap Supports High Valuation Rationale Supporting the 18x PS valuation is not just growth speed, but also improving business quality.

The SemiAnalysis report shows that the gross margin for Anthropic's inference infrastructure has jumped from 38% a year ago to over 70%. This indicates the company is not only expanding rapidly but doing so with greater efficiency. This improvement likely stems from enhanced model inference efficiency, caching and routing optimizations, increased hardware utilization, and the load stability provided by enterprise contracts.

High-growth AI companies have long faced a core question: is revenue being bought at the expense of compute losses? The significant improvement in gross margin forms the underlying logic for investors willing to assign a valuation of approximately 20x ARR. If inference gross margins above 70% can be sustained, Anthropic transitions from being a model company burning cash for growth to one closer to an AI infrastructure company with software-level margin structures.

A Reshaped Duopoly and an Impending IPO Race Anthropic's valuation surpassing OpenAI signifies the AI industry's evolution from a "one superpower, many strong players" dynamic to a competitive landscape dominated by two leading giants.

Following its $852 billion valuation round in March, OpenAI had long held the top spot among AI unicorns. Being overtaken by Anthropic holds significant symbolic value and is expected to intensify competition between the two companies across model capabilities, customer acquisition, and capital markets.

On the IPO track, the two companies are nearly neck and neck. OpenAI is expected to confidentially file its draft registration statement within days to weeks, while Anthropic could seek a public listing as early as this autumn. This timeline is expected to remain unchanged following the completion of its latest funding.