Surpassing OpenAI, Anthropic's valuation nears $1 trillion, becoming the world's most valuable AI startup.

On May 28th local time, artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced the completion of a $65 billion Series H financing round. After the investment, its valuation reached $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI's valuation of $852 billion and becoming the world's most highly valued AI startup.

In terms of the market capitalization ranking of S&P 500 companies, Anthropic's current scale would rank it as the 13th largest company in the United States. Among them, NVIDIA leads with a market value of $5.18 trillion, followed by Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Anthropic's valuation has exceeded that of Intel and Walmart, second only to Berkshire Hathaway.

The lineup of investors in Anthropic's current financing round is truly impressive. It is led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, and also includes a previously promised $15 billion investment from large cloud service providers, with Amazon contributing $5 billion. Three major storage chip giants, Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix, are also on the list of investors.

Anthropic stated in a statement that the funds from this round will be used to advance research on AI security and interpretability, expand computing infrastructure to meet the growing demand for its Claude model, and expand its product and partner ecosystem.

From being overlooked by mainstream venture capitalists when it was founded in 2021 to approaching a trillion - dollar valuation today, Anthropic has achieved a comeback in five years. Behind this is the multiple resonance of capital, technology, and business, and it is also a microcosm of the reconstruction of the global AI competition landscape.

Looking back at Anthropic's financing history, it only raised $124 million in the seed round. The industry generally regarded it as a "security idealist" project with high risks and difficult commercialization, while OpenAI had already secured $1 billion in financing at that time.

The turning point came in 2023 when Google made an initial investment of $300 million, kicking off the entry of tech giants. In September 2025, it completed a $13 billion Series F financing round, and its valuation soared to $183 billion. In February 2026, it raised another $30 billion in the Series G round, and its valuation reached $380 billion, doubling within six months. It took Anthropic only three months to increase its valuation from $380 billion to $965 billion.

Revenue data is the core factor supporting its high valuation. As of April 2026, Anthropic's annualized operating revenue exceeded $47 billion, a growth of over 50% compared to the $30 billion at the time of the Series G round at the end of February, with an average monthly new revenue of over $5 billion. The vast majority of its revenue comes from enterprise API calls, covering fields such as finance, law, and technology, with high customer unit prices and strong customer stickiness.

Compared with OpenAI's model that caters to both the consumer and enterprise markets, Anthropic mainly targets the enterprise - level market. With the 200k ultra - long context, high security, and strong reasoning ability of its Claude model, it has become the preferred choice for many enterprises' AI deployments.

While announcing the financing news, Anthropic also said that it has made rapid progress in developing "stronger security protection measures" and plans to release an AI model with Mythos - level capabilities to all customers in a few weeks. Anthropic previously stated that Mythos is too dangerous to be made available to the public. Mythos, full name Claude Mythos Preview, is the most powerful large - scale AI model launched by Anthropic in April this year.

In addition, Anthropic has launched a new version of the Claude Opus model, Claude Opus 4.8, which has achieved improvements in multiple benchmark tests on the basis of Opus 4.7 and has higher collaboration efficiency. The new version is now on the market at the same price.

There are also reports that Apollo Global Management and Blackstone Group are seeking to attract more investors for a debt financing deal of approximately $36 billion to help Anthropic build its artificial intelligence infrastructure. This debt financing is expected to be used to purchase Google's custom chips, TPUs (Tensor Processing Units), which Anthropic will then rent. People familiar with the matter said that Broadcom, which assisted Google in developing these chips, is supporting the largest part of the payment in the transaction. Investors are required to submit their subscription intentions this week, and the transaction is expected to be completed next week. However, the negotiations are still ongoing, and the details may be adjusted.

Anthropic has also recently partnered with SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk. It plans to pay nearly $45 billion to SpaceX over the next three years to obtain computing resources to support the development of its Claude artificial intelligence software. Earlier this month, Anthropic announced that it had signed an agreement to obtain more than 300 megawatts of computing power from SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, but the specific amount was not disclosed at that time. Subsequently, the two parties expanded their partnership to include the computing power of SpaceX's second data center.

On April 20th, Anthropic announced that it would lock in up to 5 gigawatts (GW) of Amazon's current and next - generation Trainium chip computing power. Amazon invested $5 billion in Anthropic on the same day and may add up to $20 billion in the future depending on the business progress. Anthropic promised to invest over $100 billion in AWS technology over the next decade, covering Amazon's current and next - generation self - developed AI chips, Trainium, and tens of millions of Graviton CPU cores.

A series of intensive business moves have enabled Anthropic to build a full - chain ecosystem of "computing power - storage - model - application." However, it still has to face three challenges. First, there is the pressure to make a profit. The huge investment in computing power has led to continuous losses, and the market expects the company to achieve positive cash flow only in 2027. Second, competition is intensifying. Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok are catching up rapidly, and OpenAI is also making efforts in the enterprise - level market. Third, there are compliance risks. Many countries have introduced AI regulatory policies, and the compliance costs have soared under the high valuation.

Market news shows that OpenAI is preparing to submit its initial public offering (IPO) documents in the next few weeks and plans to go public sometime in the fall. As a strong competitor to OpenAI, Anthropic has also privately started preparations for an IPO, but the listing time has not been finalized.

This article is from Jiemian News. Reporter: Song Jianan. Republished by 36Kr with permission.