Anthropic is closing a funding round this week that would value it above $900 billion, according to Bloomberg, making it the most valuable private AI company in the world and officially pushing OpenAI to second place. For the first time since OpenAI set the benchmark in March 2026, there is a new number at the top of the AI capital stack.
The round is expected to exceed $30 billion. Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Altimeter Capital, and Greenoaks Capital Partners are co-leading, each contributing roughly $2 billion. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and General Catalyst are also participating. Bloomberg reported the deal came together within weeks of Anthropic receiving inbound investor proposals in late April. The commitments are still being finalized and terms could change.
OpenAI’s most recent valuation was $852 billion, set during a $122 billion funding round completed in March 2026.
The Revenue Story Behind the Anthropic $900 Billion Valuation
The valuation trajectory is difficult to process in sequence. Anthropic was worth $61.5 billion in March 2025. By September 2025 it had reached $183 billion in its Series F. February 2026 brought a $380 billion valuation in a $30 billion Series G, at the time described as the second-largest private financing round in history. Now, roughly 14 months after the March 2025 figure, the company is being valued at more than 15 times that amount.
The revenue growth is what investors are betting on. Anthropic reported $4.8 billion in first-quarter 2026 revenue and has projected $10.9 billion for the second quarter, per reporting from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. That would be more than double Q1, and more than the company’s entire 2025 revenue in a single quarter. The company has told investors its annualized run rate will exceed $50 billion by end of June 2026.
Dario Amodei stated at a developer conference this month that Anthropic experienced 80 times growth in annualized revenue and usage in Q1 2026 alone.
For context, Salesforce took roughly two decades to reach $30 billion in annual revenue. Anthropic is on track to hit that figure as a quarterly run rate.
It is worth being precise about what these numbers are and are not. Anthropic’s revenue figures are unaudited and based on non-GAAP accounting methods. The company is not yet subject to public-company reporting standards. Tech journalist Ed Zitron has published analysis arguing that Anthropic’s projected Q2 operating profit is a one-time result tied to a temporary compute cost discount from its newly signed SpaceX infrastructure deal, and that the underlying cost structure has not fundamentally changed. That is a legitimate question the company will have to answer when it files its S-1.
Claude Code Is Doing Most of the Work
The product driving the acceleration is Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding tool that became generally available in May 2025. It reached $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months of launch and was generating over $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue by February 2026, per Anthropic’s own Series G announcement. Enterprise customers now represent approximately 80% of Anthropic’s total revenue. More than 1,000 businesses are spending over $1 million annually on Anthropic services, a figure that doubled in under two months after the February Series G closed.
Claude is available on all three major cloud platforms: AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure. That distribution breadth is not a coincidence. It is the reason enterprise adoption compounded this fast.
The Compute Infrastructure Bet
Anthropic has arranged a nearly $45 billion deal with SpaceX to expand computing capacity, and a separate $1.8 billion agreement with Akamai Technologies. Google has committed up to $40 billion including a $10 billion immediate investment. Amazon agreed in April 2026 to invest an additional $5 billion immediately, with up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones.
These are not just capital investments. They are GPU and TPU capacity secured in advance, which is the actual constraint in AI right now. A company that cannot run its models at scale cannot grow revenue at scale. Anthropic has done the infrastructure work that its valuation requires.
What Happens Next for the Race to IPO
This is widely expected to be Anthropic’s final private raise before an IPO. Bloomberg reported in March that the company is targeting a public listing as early as October 2026, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley in early underwriting discussions. The offering could raise more than $60 billion, ranking among the largest technology listings in history.
OpenAI filed its S-1 confidentially with the SEC on May 22, targeting a September 2026 public listing at a valuation of $852 billion to $1 trillion, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading that deal as well.
Two frontier AI companies, both targeting Q4 2026 public listings, both at or near $1 trillion. This is the IPO setup that the AI industry has been building toward for three years. Public markets will get to decide, with full financial disclosure, whether the revenue trajectories are real, whether the cost structures are sustainable, and whether either company deserves the kind of valuation that puts it alongside Apple and Microsoft in the global equity rankings.
Anthropic carries real risks into that filing. The company reached a $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit alleging that pirated books were used without authorization to train Claude. Universal Music Group, BMG, and Concord have filed a $3 billion copyright lawsuit involving song lyrics and sheet music, naming Dario and Daniela Amodei individually. The company is also in active litigation against the U.S. Department of Defense, which designated Anthropic a supply chain risk after the company declined to allow its technology to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of American citizens. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of that designation, but the case is not closed.
The Signal This Sends
Whether or not the Anthropic $900 billion valuation holds when public markets get to scrutinize the books, the signal this week sends is already permanent: the AI race is no longer primarily about which model scores higher on benchmarks. It is about who is generating real enterprise revenue, at a pace that justifies building compute infrastructure at geopolitical scale.
Claude Code did not win because it had the best benchmark score. It won because it fit into the workflow that enterprise development teams actually use every day. That is the product lesson that every AI company building for B2B right now should be studying.
The IPO filings, when they come, will be the most consequential financial documents in AI history. Both companies will have to show their actual numbers. The AI industry’s relationship with unverified projections is about to end.
