Anthropic Scores $65B Funding Round Following Legal Victory

Photo Credit: Igor Omilaev

Anthropic announces a $65 billion funding round at a valuation of $965 billion, pushing it ahead of OpenAI in the artificial intelligence race.

On Thursday, Anthropic said it had raised $65 billion in its latest funding round at a post-money valuation of $965 billion, bolstering the Claude chatbot company in the artificial intelligence race. More impressively, the latest valuation surpasses market leader OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion in March. Anthropic’s valuation has more than doubled since February.

It’s the latest win for Anthropic, which just scored a legal victory this week in the vicarious liability claim filed against it by major music publishers, including Concord. The labels’ copyright infringement case, which alleges that Anthropic committed DMCA violations and other infringement related to torrenting data and training its AI models, is still in motion. The same judge is presiding over both cases, and a third, separate action lodged against the company by BMG Rights Management.

“Since our Series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, and our run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month,” Anthropic said in a blog post.

The latest round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Coatue, and ICONIQ, among others. Strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix also joined in, alongside $15 billion of previously committed investments from “hyperscalers.” That itself includes $5 billion from Amazon, which said in April it would invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic. Amazon also invested $8 billion in the company previously.

According to investors and sources close to the matter, the company’s pursuit of private funding coincides with its preparation for a public listing. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are eyeing the public market, possibly as soon as this year, to slurp up the valuable computational resources needed to power their existing services and train new models.

Anthropic has actually struggled to meet demand, which has forced it to institute usage limits during peak hours and incentivize off-peak use by offering more resources during those times.