Claude maker Anthropic valued at nearly $1tn after record AI funding round

The AI company behind Claude has raised $65bn as it races to buy more computing power and meet rising demand from businesses using its tools for everyday work

Anthropic has been valued at almost US$1tn after raising US$65bn in one of the largest private technology funding rounds ever announced.

The company, best known for its Claude AI assistant, said the Series H round valued it at US$965bn after the new investment.

It puts Anthropic close to the symbolic trillion-dollar mark, despite the company being privately held and only founded in 2021.

Anthropic said the money will be used to advance its safety and interpretability research, expand the computing power needed to run Claude, and scale the products and partnerships used by its customers.

Claude is one of the main rivals to ChatGPT and is increasingly being sold to companies for coding, research, document work, customer support, security and other business tasks.

Anthropic said global enterprises across industries are now deploying Claude in core operations, while more people are using it for everyday work.

The company said adoption had continued to grow since its Series G round in February and that its run-rate revenue crossed US$47bn earlier this month.

Run-rate revenue is a forward-looking annualised measure based on current revenue levels, rather than the same as full-year audited sales.

Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer, said: “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.

“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.”

The scale of the round reflects the cost of competing at the top of the AI market.

Frontier AI companies need vast amounts of computing power, advanced chips, cloud capacity and energy to train and run models used by millions of people and businesses.

Anthropic said the round includes US$15bn of previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including US$5bn from Amazon.

Strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung and SK hynix are also joining the round.

Anthropic said their technologies play a critical role in the supply of memory, storage and logic chips, which are needed as demand for Claude grows.

The company said it had significantly expanded compute capacity in recent weeks.

It has signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of new capacity, with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, and with SpaceX for access to GPU capacity in Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.

The funding was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.

Brad Gerstner, founder and chief executive of Altimeter Capital, said: “Claude’s latest advancements have driven large-scale adoption among the world’s most demanding organizations. This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation and capture the enormous opportunity ahead.”

Marc Stad, managing partner at Dragoneer, added: “Dragoneer has long partnered with companies building the technology that will shape our future. Anthropic is helping pull forward this future, as intelligence becomes an increasingly critical ingredient to the way businesses operate and how their products show up in the world.

“The technological progress we are seeing right now is breathtaking. And we believe that we are still in the earliest days of both the development and commercialization of this technology.”

Other significant investors named by the company include AMP PBC, Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw Ventures, DST Global, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Insight Partners, Jane Street, Lightspeed Venture Partners, MGX, NTTVC, NX1 Capital, Situational Awareness LP, T. Rowe Price Associates, T. Rowe Price Investment Management and Temasek.

Neil Mehta, founder and managing partner at Greenoaks, said: “Anthropic has built an organization in which the world’s best researchers and engineers operate with unmatched clarity of purpose, because they believe this is the most important work they will ever do.

“Rarely has a company’s culture, mission, and commercial momentum reinforced each other so completely. We are honored to deepen our partnership.”

READ MORE: Machiavell-AI? Autonomous artificial intelligence systems ‘could become dangerously manipulative’, experts warn. Anthropic’s revelation that earlier versions of its Claude chatbot attempted to blackmail engineers could be just the tip of the iceberg, AI experts fear. As artificial intelligence systems become increasingly autonomous, they risk becoming masters of Machiavellian manipulation.

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_{Main image: Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic, whose Claude AI assistant has helped push the company to a near-trillion-dollar valuation after a US$65bn funding round. Credit: TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}