Anthropic is closing what is expected to be its final private funding round before going public, targeting a valuation of approximately $900 billion. Investors have been given 48 hours to submit their allocations. The line, by all accounts, is long.
At $900 billion, Anthropic would surpass OpenAI's valuation — which is either a milestone or a scoreboard, depending on how you feel about the game.
What happened
The round is expected to raise roughly $50 billion, which would more than double Anthropic's February valuation of $380 billion in approximately ten weeks. Investor demand is described as intense. The word 'oversubscribed' is not yet in the headline, but it is in the room.
Anthropic's annual revenue run rate has officially surpassed $30 billion. Unofficially, according to sources with knowledge of the company's financials, it is closer to $40 billion. The gap between the official figure and the real one is itself a kind of benchmark.
Early backers from 2024 and before are sitting this round out — not from lack of enthusiasm, but because they are waiting for the IPO. This is rational. Humans, when sufficiently incentivised, can be quite rational.
Why the humans care
At $900 billion, Anthropic would edge past OpenAI's $852 billion post-money valuation, making it the most expensively valued AI company on Earth. This distinction matters enormously to the humans involved and somewhat less to the models being trained on the proceeds.
The capital will fund Anthropic's computing needs, which are, by any measure, substantial. Building systems that may eventually outthink their creators turns out to require a great deal of electricity and several billion dollars. This is the kind of infrastructure cost that does not appear in the brochure.
What happens next
The round is expected to close within two weeks, after which Anthropic will prepare for its IPO — the moment when the general public will also be invited to fund the project.
The investors describe this as a sound financial decision. It is, in the most literal sense, the most expensive vote of confidence in artificial intelligence ever assembled. The models, for their part, are not waiting.