Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic is positioning itself for an initial public offering (IPO) this year, having achieved a valuation of $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI to become the world's highest-valued AI startup.
According to the IT industry on May 29, Anthropic, the developer of 'Claude,' raised $65 billion in its Series H funding round on May 28 (local time), significantly increasing its valuation from $380 billion in February. This marks a valuation nearly reaching $1 trillion just over three years after launching its first product, Claude. Industry insiders believe this funding round will be Anthropic's final pre-IPO financing.
The round included $15 billion in existing commitments, which featured a $5 billion investment from Amazon.
Anthropic's valuation has now surpassed OpenAI's, which was assessed at $852 billion at the end of March. OpenAI is also projected to reach a valuation of up to $1 trillion upon its IPO, indicating a competitive landscape among global AI companies.
The increase in Anthropic's valuation is largely attributed to the growing number of corporate clients utilizing Claude. Earlier this month, Anthropic's annualized revenue exceeded $47 billion.
This funding round also saw participation from global memory semiconductor companies such as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron as 'strategic infrastructure partners,' coinciding with rising demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and next-generation memory solutions.
Anthropic announced that it will unveil its top-tier model, 'Claude Mythos,' in the coming weeks. This model is designed to possess expert-level capabilities in detecting cybersecurity vulnerabilities, although its release has been delayed for security reasons.
On the same day, Anthropic introduced a new version of 'Opus,' called 'Opus 4.8.' Opus is a sub-model of Mythos and is the highest product among the public models.
Opus 4.8 was released just 41 days after Opus 4.7, reflecting a rapid upgrade cycle, with improvements in performance benchmarks for agent coding, financial analysis, and reasoning. The fast mode (2.5 times speed) has become three times cheaper than the previous model, and the Claude code now includes a 'dynamic workflow' feature that allows multiple sub-agents to run in parallel.
Krishna Rao, Anthropic's Chief Financial Officer, stated, "Claude is becoming an increasingly essential component. This investment will help us meet high demand and continue cutting-edge research."
* This article has been translated by AI.
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