Anthropic Seeks $30 Billion at a $900 Billion Valuation

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude family of models, is in early talks to raise at least $30 billion in fresh financing at a pre-money valuation north of $900 billion, according to a Bloomberg report published on 12 May. If the round closes on the terms reported, the company would briefly leap past OpenAI's current $852 billion valuation and put itself within reach of the trillion-dollar mark.

The deal is not finalised. No term sheet has been signed, and Anthropic has not confirmed the numbers. Sources told Bloomberg the round could close as soon as the end of May, though that timeline has already slipped from earlier expectations.

Why the valuation jump?

Anthropic raised a $30 billion Series G in February at a $380 billion post-money valuation. Three months later, investors appear willing to value it at more than twice that. The numbers driving that re-pricing come from the company's own enterprise business. CNBC reported in February that annualised revenue had crossed $9 billion. By May, that figure was over $44 billion, a roughly fivefold increase in a quarter.

Gross margins, long a sore point for AI companies bleeding cash on inference, are reportedly now above 70 percent. Anthropic also claims more than one thousand customers spending at least $1 million per year on Claude products, with named accounts including PwC, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs.

How big is too big?

A $900 billion valuation puts Anthropic in roughly the same neighbourhood as Visa and JPMorgan Chase. For a company that did not exist eight years ago and still sells primarily through one API, this is striking. Two reads are possible. The bull case is that Claude has become genuine enterprise infrastructure, with switching costs that justify multi-year contracts at the prices customers are now paying. The bear case is that AI valuations are being marked to a future that may not arrive on schedule, and that the same investors writing these cheques are also the customers paying the revenue. Some of the dollars are circular.

Either way, the round, if it closes, will reshape the cap tables of every Anthropic competitor still trying to raise on weaker comparables. Expect OpenAI's next round to come in higher. Earlier this month we covered the launch of OpenAI's self-serve ad platform, part of the same push by frontier labs to find revenue beyond pure model access.