Anthropic to close $30B round at $900B valuation, leapfrogging OpenAI

Anthropic is set to close a funding round of more than $30 billion at a valuation above $900 billion as soon as next week, vaulting past OpenAI to become the world's most valuable AI startup.bloomberg Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer, Altimeter and Greenoaks are co-leading the deal with roughly $2 billion checks apiece, with Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and General Catalyst joining among existing backers.bloomberg The terms more than double the $380 billion valuation Anthropic set just three months ago in its February Series G.pymnts

A revenue curve unlike anything in enterprise software

The price tag rests on a growth rate CEO Dario Amodei has called "just crazy" and "too hard to handle." Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate hit roughly $30 billion in April, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 — 80x year-over-year growth in the first quarter.venturebeat Anthropic told investors it expects to more than double quarterly revenue to $10.9 billion in Q2 and to surpass a $50 billion run rate by the end of June.pymnts

Claude Code, the agentic coding tool Anthropic launched in mid-2025, is the engine. The product crossed $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue by February 2026, business subscriptions quadrupled in the first six weeks of the year, and Anthropic now counts more than 1,000 enterprise customers spending over $1 million annually on Claude.venturebeat Eight of the Fortune 10 are now customers.forbes

The math investors are arguing about

At $900 billion on a roughly $30 billion run rate, Anthropic is being priced at about 30 times revenue — extreme by traditional standards, but the bid case assumes the 10x-per-year curve has years left to run.forbes Some of Anthropic's earliest backers are reportedly skipping this round, waiting for an IPO that bankers expect to price between $400 billion and $500 billion as early as October 2026.forbes If that gap holds, late-stage investors entering at $900 billion would be underwater before the lockup ends.

OpenAI has publicly disputed Anthropic's revenue accounting, arguing that booking gross spend from AWS, Google Cloud and Azure inflates the figure by roughly $8 billion versus a net basis closer to $22 billion.forbes The methodology question will be resolved in an S-1.

Capital pulled forward into compute

The round is effectively pre-spent on infrastructure. Anthropic plans to spend roughly $19 billion on training and inference compute in 2026, nearly matching full-year revenue, with reported gross margins compressed near 40% after inference costs ran 23% over plan.forbes Multi-year capacity commitments to Amazon, Google, Microsoft and — most unexpectedly — Elon Musk's xAI, which is leasing Anthropic over 300 megawatts at its Memphis Colossus 1 site, have made each fundraise a down payment on the next one.venturebeat Investor demand for the round reportedly hit $40-50 billion, with one institutional backer offering $5 billion unable to secure a meeting with Anthropic's CFO.techcrunch