Just now, another trillion-dollar AI unicorn was born, closely approaching ByteDance and OpenAI.

According to ZDONGXI on September 3rd, early this morning, large - model unicorn Anthropic announced the completion of a Series F financing round worth $13 billion (approximately RMB 92.8 billion). After the investment, its valuation reached $183 billion (approximately RMB 1.3 trillion), nearly three times its valuation of $61.5 billion (approximately RMB 439.1 billion) in March this year.

This also means that Anthropic has become the third - highest - valued AI unicorn globally, only after OpenAI and ByteDance.

Currently, the top two AI unicorns globally are ByteDance (valued at $330 billion, approximately RMB 2.4 trillion) and OpenAI (valued at $300 billion, approximately RMB 2.2 trillion).

Anthropic, co - founded by Dario Amodei, the former vice - president of research at OpenAI, and his sister Daniela Amodei, has long been regarded as one of the most formidable challengers to OpenAI.

Anthropic's Chief Financial Officer, Krishna Rao, mentioned in a blog post: "We are seeing exponential growth in demand across our entire customer base." At the beginning of 2025, Anthropic's annualized revenue reached $1 billion (approximately RMB 7.14 billion). Eight months later, its annualized revenue has now exceeded $5 billion (approximately RMB 35.7 billion).

From a customer perspective, its blog reveals that Anthropic currently serves over 300,000 enterprise customers. The number of large - scale customers has increased by nearly seven times in the past year, and each large - scale customer means an annual revenue of over $100,000 (approximately RMB 714,000) for the company.

Today, the main driving force behind its business growth is the AI programming tool Claude Code, which became extremely popular this year. Claude Code was officially launched in May this year after a research preview. Its usage has increased by over ten times in three months, generating annual revenue of over $500 million (approximately RMB 3.6 billion).

This round of financing was jointly led by venture capital firms ICONIQ, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from sovereign wealth funds such as the Qatar Investment Authority and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC). Its blog mentioned that the new financing will be used to expand enterprise adoption, deepen security research, and support international expansion.

It's worth noting that Anthropic had previously completed nine rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of $30.04 billion (approximately RMB 214.5 billion).

01 Revenue Exceeds $500 Million in 3 Months: AI Programming Tool Drives Growth

In 2021, Dario Amodei, then the vice - president of research at OpenAI, left with a research team of over ten people, including his sister Daniela Amodei, to found Anthropic.

Today, this startup has become one of the most powerful competitors to OpenAI.

In 2023, Anthropic released the first version of its chatbot, Claude, which was updated to Claude 4.1 in August this year.

Anthropic's official blog announced that the new model outperforms OpenAI o3 in agent tool invocation and multilingual Q&A capabilities. Its scores in agent programming are 74.5% and 43.3%, significantly surpassing OpenAI o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. However, it still lags behind OpenAI o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro in visual reasoning and mathematical abilities.

In addition, in February this year, Anthropic launched its own AI programming tool, Claude Code. In May, it was fully opened to the public, transitioning from a research preview to an official product. Anthropic's blog states that Claude Code has now become the preferred tool for developers.

Currently, Claude Code is integrated with its most powerful model, Claude Opus 4.1. It has code - base awareness and can directly edit files and run commands in the user's development environment.

Since its public release, the usage of Claude Code has increased by over ten times in three months, generating annual revenue of over $500 million (approximately RMB 3.6 billion).

02 Over $3 Billion in 9 Rounds of Financing: Google and Amazon Compete to Invest

Since 2021, Anthropic has completed eight rounds of financing, raising a total of $17.04 billion (approximately RMB 121.6 billion). The current ninth round of financing is in progress. The specific financing rounds and amounts are as follows:

May 2021: Series A financing, amounting to $124 million (approximately RMB 890 million), with major investors including Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt, and Jaan Tallinn.

April 2022: Series B financing, amounting to $580 million (approximately RMB 4.17 billion), with the main investor being FTX.

February 2023: $300 million (approximately RMB 2.1 billion) invested by Google, which became a strategic shareholder.

May 2023: Series C financing, amounting to $450 million (approximately RMB 3.23 billion). After the investment, the valuation was $4.1 billion (approximately RMB 29.44 billion). Spark Capital led the round, with participation from Google, Salesforce Ventures, Zoom, etc.

September 2023: Amazon announced a strategic cooperation, with an initial investment of $1.25 billion (approximately RMB 898 million) and a planned total investment of up to $4 billion (approximately RMB 28.72 billion). Subsequently, Amazon became its main cloud service provider.

October 2023: Google invested $500 million (approximately RMB 3.59 billion) and promised an additional $1.5 billion (approximately RMB 10.77 billion) in the future.

February 2024: Completed a Series D financing of $750 million (approximately RMB 5.4 billion), led by Menlo Ventures.

March and May 2024: Raised $884 million (approximately RMB 6.3 billion) and $452 million (approximately RMB 3.2 billion) respectively in the secondary market.

November 2024: Amounting to $4 billion (approximately RMB 28.72 billion), with the main investor being Amazon.

March 2025: Series E financing, amounting to $3.5 billion (approximately RMB 25 billion), led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The post - investment valuation was $61.5 billion (approximately RMB 439.1 billion).

Well - known technology companies such as Google, Amazon, and Salesforce are among its investors.

03 High Operating Expenses Are a Concern, but Investors Focus on Soaring Revenue

According to reports, Anthropic recently informed investors that the gross profit margin of its direct sales of AI models and the Claude chatbot to customers is approximately 60% and is moving towards 70%. This gross profit margin usually refers to the profit ratio after deducting server costs and customer support expenses. People familiar with the matter explained that these gross profit margins fluctuate based on the company's efficient use of computing resources.

People familiar with the matter also added that earlier this year, the gross profit margin of Anthropic's sales of the Claude model through Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud was - 30%. It is speculated that the reason might be that Amazon and Google took a significant cut when reselling Anthropic's models to cloud customers.

However, the revenue generated through cloud service providers may only account for a small portion of Anthropic's total revenue. As of the end of 2024, approximately 70% of its revenue came from direct sales. It is currently unclear what the exact proportion of direct - sales revenue is, but the latest disclosure shows that Anthropic's overall gross profit margin may remain at 50% - 55%, the same as at the end of 2023.

In comparison, OpenAI predicted at the beginning of this year that its gross profit margin in 2025 would be 48% and expected it to increase steadily, reaching 70% by 2029. It is unclear whether the two companies calculate gross profit margins in the same way.

It's worth noting that the gross profit margins of both Anthropic and OpenAI do not reflect their annual operating expenses, including billions of dollars in AI R & D investment and human resources, which are much higher than those of traditional software companies.

Although the R & D costs of AI models are high, due to algorithm improvements and increased efficiency in using AI chips, the operating costs of models from both OpenAI and Anthropic are showing a downward trend, which is a relief to investors. However, currently, investors are more concerned about the astonishing revenue growth of the two companies, and both are expected to significantly exceed their optimistic revenue targets set at the beginning of the year.

04 Conclusion: Capital Concentrates on Leading AI Startups

According to data from global consulting firm Crunchbase, approximately $40 billion (approximately RMB 285.6 billion) in venture capital flowed into the AI field in the second quarter globally, with foundation - model companies raising $5.5 billion (approximately RMB 39.3 billion). Anthropic's new financing this time also shows that venture capital is increasingly concentrating on large startups that have already received sufficient funds.

Meanwhile, in addition to previous venture capital institutions and well - known technology giants, many sovereign funds have also participated in this company's financing, indicating investors' recognition of the value of this AI unicorn.

This article is from the WeChat official account “ZDONGXI” (ID: zhidxcom). Author: Cheng Qian. Republished by 36Kr with permission.