Anthropic Seeks $900 Billion Valuation in New $30 Billion Round

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is in discussions to raise at least $30 billion in a new funding round that would value the company at $900 billion, a move that would make it the most valuable private AI lab in the world. The new financing, which sources told the Financial Times could close within two months, underscores the intense investor appetite for a shrinking number of top-tier AI contenders.

The potential financing comes as "investors are ready to throw any dollar amount at Anthropic," one existing investor told the Financial Times. The firm, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, has seen its valuation climb at a historic pace as enterprise demand for its Claude family of models has surged.

The new funding round would dwarf previous capital raises and set a new benchmark for the AI sector. Anthropic was valued at $380 billion in a $30 billion Series G round in February, which itself was more than double the $183 billion valuation from its Series F round just five months prior. The company has secured massive commitments from strategic backers, including up to $40 billion from Google and $20 billion from Amazon, as it races to acquire the computing power necessary to compete with OpenAI and other foundational model builders. Anthropic’s annualized revenue is projected to exceed $45 billion, a significant jump from $9 billion at the end of 2025.

This capital injection is critical for Anthropic to accelerate its research and development and scale its infrastructure in the high-stakes battle for AI dominance. A $900 billion valuation would place it ahead of Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion, intensifying the rivalry between the two leading AI companies and their cloud-provider backers.

The Trillion-Dollar Speculation

Beyond formal venture capital rounds, a more speculative market is placing even loftier valuations on the AI darling. On crypto-based platforms offering tokenized derivatives tied to private company equity, Anthropic’s implied valuation has soared as high as $1.6 trillion, according to data from venues Ventuals and PreStocks. This shadow market, which allows retail traders to speculate on private company values through instruments like perpetual futures, has seen trading activity surge since the start of the year. However, these trades do not represent actual equity, and Anthropic has previously warned that such tokenized structures may carry no legal value and that the company treats them as void.

Global AI Arms Race

The immense funding figures in the U.S. are mirrored by a similar push in China to cultivate homegrown AI champions. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, is reportedly raising capital at a $45 billion valuation, a significant figure for a company that has so far been funded internally by its billionaire founder. The round is said to involve state-backed funds and tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba, highlighting a national strategy to build a domestic AI ecosystem, partly by optimizing models to run on locally produced hardware from firms like Huawei. This global context shows the strategic importance nations are placing on foundational AI development, fueling a worldwide capital-intensive arms race for talent and technology.

For investors, Anthropic's potential $900 billion valuation represents a new peak in the AI investment cycle, driven by strong enterprise adoption of models like Claude Code and its new Cowork agent. The valuation, more than 20 times its projected annualized revenue, puts pressure on competitors and their backers. While the market has shown a willingness to pay steep premiums for top-tier AI assets, the sustainability of such valuations will depend on Anthropic’s ability to convert its technical prowess into long-term profitability against a backdrop of rapidly escalating computational and research costs.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.