The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, and co-led by Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN. Axios called it one of the largest private funding rounds in the history of technology. It is also one of the fastest re-ratings: Anthropic was worth 380 billion dollars as recently as February.
This is the moment the league table actually flipped, and it is worth being precise about why.
The Number That Matters Is the Comparison
Anthropic's new valuation tops OpenAI by any recent measure of OpenAI's worth. Axios reported Thursday that OpenAI was most recently valued at 730 billion dollars. Even against the higher figure from OpenAI's March primary round, reported at 852 billion dollars, Anthropic's 965 billion now sits above it. The order has reversed.
The reversal is not a paper trick built on a tiny new-money sliver. The 65 billion dollars raised is real primary capital, and it almost triples the company's February valuation. For a business that told investors last summer it did not expect to turn a profit until 2028, the speed of the climb is the story.
What is funding it is revenue. Anthropic said its run-rate revenue crossed 47 billion dollars earlier this month. A year ago that figure was a fraction of the size. The company has spent 2026 converting enterprise adoption of Claude Code and Claude into the kind of top-line growth that justifies a near-trillion-dollar mark, at least to the investors writing the checks.
How Anthropic Climbed Here in Four Months
LDS readers have watched this number creep upward all spring. In April, we covered the secondary-market trades that pushed Anthropic past OpenAI on paper while its primary round still sat at 380 billion dollars. Thursday closed that gap. The whisper number from the secondary market is now an official primary valuation, announced the same morning Anthropic shipped its new flagship model, Claude Opus 4.8.
The Round Is Really a Compute Deal in Disguise
Read the investor list closely and a second story appears: this is money raised to buy chips and power.
Of the 65 billion dollars, 15 billion comes from previously committed hyperscaler investments, including 5 billion dollars from Amazon. Anthropic also named three strategic infrastructure partners whose hardware it depends on: Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix, the companies that make the world's memory and storage. Micron's own stock recently crossed a trillion-dollar market cap on exactly this kind of AI demand.
The capital lands on top of a compute buildout Anthropic has been assembling all year. The company recently signed agreements for up to five gigawatts of new capacity with Amazon, five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity with Google and Broadcom, and access to GPU capacity in Elon Musk's Colossus supercomputers through SpaceX. Claude is now the first frontier model available across all three major clouds: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
"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," said Krishna Rao, Anthropic's Chief Financial Officer.
The Other Side: A Valuation Is Not a Verdict
The number is staggering. It is also a private mark set by the people who most want it to go up.
Anthropic's 965 billion dollar valuation comes from a funding round, not a public market. The investors setting the price are the same ones who profit if it rises, and private valuations have historically run ahead of what public shareholders will pay. OpenAI's own confidential filing for a trillion-dollar IPO came with a warning from its own finance chief that the company was not ready, a reminder that headline valuations in this sector are aspirations as much as appraisals.
There is also the circularity problem that runs through the whole AI economy. A meaningful slice of Anthropic's new capital comes from the same hyperscalers it pays for compute, and much of it will flow straight back to them in cloud and chip spending. When the same dollars count as both an investment in Anthropic and revenue for Amazon and Google, "most valuable AI startup" becomes a harder phrase to pin down. Whether 47 billion dollars of run-rate revenue can grow into a near-trillion-dollar price before the funding cycle turns is the open question no press release answers.
The Bottom Line
Anthropic raised 65 billion dollars on Thursday at a 965 billion dollar valuation, almost tripling its February price and passing OpenAI to become the most valuable AI startup in the world. The climb is real, and so is the revenue underneath it: a run rate that crossed 47 billion dollars this month, up from a small fraction of that a year ago.
But the round is as much an infrastructure ledger as a vote of confidence. Fifteen billion dollars of it is hyperscaler money, the strategic partners are chipmakers, and a large share of the capital is earmarked to flow back to the clouds Anthropic rents. The title changed hands on Thursday. The harder question, whether a private number set by interested parties survives contact with a public market, is still unanswered.
For three years, OpenAI was the company every other AI lab was measured against. As of Thursday, OpenAI has a number to chase too.
Sources
- Anthropic raises 65 billion dollars in Series H funding at a 965 billion dollar valuation (Anthropic, May 28, 2026)
- Anthropic overtakes OpenAI as the most valuable AI startup (Axios, May 28, 2026)
- Anthropic Eclipses OpenAI With Valuation of $965 Billion (Bloomberg, May 28, 2026)
- Anthropic tops OpenAI as most valuable AI startup, nears $1 trillion valuation in latest round (CNBC, May 28, 2026)
- Anthropic bests OpenAI in valuation race, hitting $965B with Series H (PitchBook, May 28, 2026)