Anthropic, the US AI startup behind the Claude chatbot, has raised $30bn (£22bn) in a funding round that more than doubled its valuation to $380bn.
The company’s previous funding round in September achieved a value of $183bn, with further improvements in the technology since then spurring even greater investor interest.
The fundraising was announced amid a series of stock market moves against industries that face disruption from the latest models, including software, trucking and logistics, wealth management and commercial property services.
The funding round, led by the Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and the hedge fund Coatue Management, is among the largest private fundraising deals on record.
“Anthropic is the clear category leader in enterprise AI,” said Choo Yong Cheen, the chief investment officer of private equity at GIC.
Anthropic said its annualised revenue – an estimate of full-year sales based on recent company data – had reached $14bn, having grown more than tenfold in each of the past three years. A significant driver of recent growth has been Claude Code, the company’s AI-powered coding tool that became generally available in May 2025.
Anthropic’s rival OpenAI, backed by Microsoft and SoftBank, has been assembling what is reportedly a far larger round of up to $100bn that would value the ChatGPT developer at about $830bn.
The staggering sums being raised reflect equally staggering burn rates, with the companies spending cash to cover their huge costs of computing and attracting researcher talent.
Anthropic has forecast reducing its cash burn to roughly a third of revenue in 2026 and just 9% by 2027, with a break-even target of 2028 – two years ahead of its rival, according to reports. Both companies are widely expected to pursue initial public offerings in the second half of 2026.
The rapid valuation increases for leading AI startups such as Anthropic and OpenAI, whose price tags far exceed those of many of the US’s largest listed companies, has alarmed some observers. Last year, a leading British tech investor, James Anderson, said he found sharp increases in valuations of companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic “disconcerting”.
Some listed firms at the forefront of the AI industry have also come under stock market pressure in recent days.
Shares in Alphabet, Google’s parent company, have fallen by 4.2% so far this week, indicating some investors are still spooked by the big AI-related spending plans it laid out this month. Meta has declined by 1.7% during this week. Shares in Nvidia, a leading chipmaker and key provider of AI infrastructure, dropped by 1.6% on Thursday amid a wider sell-off but have been flat on the week.
“A gloomy session on Wall Street on Thursday put investors in a grumpy mood at the end of the trading week,” said Russ Mould, the investment director at investment platform AJ Bell.
“Association with AI has gone from party to peril as investors reappraise what the technology means for companies.
“Some are concerned about excessive levels of spending and others fear AI will disrupt multiple industries. It all adds up to a cocktail of worries and that’s bad for market sentiment more broadly,” Mould added.
Founded in 2021 by the siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, both former executives at OpenAI, Anthropic has positioned itself as a safety-focused alternative in the AI race.
The funding round also comes shortly after Anthropic’s first television commercials were broadcast during Super Bowl LX, using the campaign to emphasise that its products remain ad-free. The ads took an apparent jab at OpenAI, which has begun to introduce advertising into the free version of ChatGPT.
Anthropic’s earlier backers include Amazon, which has invested $8bn and serves as a primary computing partner through its datacentres, as well as Google, which invested $2bn in 2023.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this article
