Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become world’s most valuable AI company at $965bn

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has officially overtaken OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable AI company, with a valuation reaching $965 billion. The announcement was made on April 10, just ahead of the expected IPOs of both tech firms.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot series, said it had raised $65 billion from private investors in a funding round led by Altimeter Capital, Greenoaks, Dragoneer, and Sequoia Capital. The round pushed Anthropic’s valuation well beyond the $852 billion that OpenAI achieved in its March funding round.

Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said: “This funding will help us meet the historic demand we are experiencing, maintain our leading position in research, and bring Claude to more workplaces.”

Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner praised Claude’s adoption by “the world’s most demanding organizations” as evidence of Anthropic’s dominance in the field. “This momentum places Anthropic in a position to lead the next phase of AI innovation and capture the immense opportunity ahead,” Gerstner said.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic quickly emerged as one of the leading companies in the race to dominate Silicon Valley AI. Claude, first launched in 2023, is now one of the most popular AI models globally. In March, the San Francisco-based company said the chatbot was receiving more than 1 million new sign-ups per day.

Despite its rapid ascent, Anthropic also faces challenges, notably a dispute with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, which considers the company a “supply chain risk” because it refused to grant unrestricted access to its tools for military purposes.

In a separate announcement the same day, Anthropic unveiled the latest version of Claude, Opus 4.8, calling it a “modest but tangible improvement” over its predecessor.

Anthropic, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are all expected to go public in the near future, and are anticipated to be among the largest initial public offerings in history.

Professor Emeritus Jay R. Ritter of the University of Florida, an IPO expert, noted that Anthropic has generated significant market excitement due to its widespread use by companies for software coding. “This is a large market where Anthropic appears to have the best product. The valuation increase in such a short time is unprecedented for a startup,” Ritter told Al Jazeera. He pointed out that public tech companies like SK Hynix, Nvidia, and Alphabet have also seen large gains, but not as dramatic in percentage terms.

While questions remain about whether massive AI investments are creating a bubble, Professor Ritter argued that a few successful companies in this field could reap enormous profits. “Nobody wants to use the eighth-best product, so these companies will either be among the few that succeed or they will have zero market share,” he said. “The tech industry is different from the restaurant industry, where there are no huge economies of scale and competition caps profit margins.”