Anthropic just topped OpenAI on a major metric ahead of rival IPOs

Anthropic is nearing a 1 trillion valuation, topping rival OpenAI and making it the most valuable artificial intelligence startup, as the two competitors head toward their initial public offerings. The San Francisco-based AI company announced a new round of 65 billion Series H financing on Thursday, bringing it to a 965 billion valuation. The latest round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, and included 15 billion of prior commitments, 5 billion of which came from Amazon. In just the last few months, Anthropic has nearly tripled its worth from 380 billion in February, CNBC reported. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI, which was considered the heavyweight in the fight to dominate AI—and was the more talked-about company just a year ago—now trails behind, valued at 852 billion (which includes 122 billion funding it raised in March). Anthropic’s dizzying rise is in large part due to its AI assistant Claude Code coding software. On Thursday, the company released Claude Opus 4.8, its latest version, and confirmed plans to roll out Claude Mythos models with advanced cybersecurity capability, which had been delayed due to security risks. So far, it’s only been available to select group of companies. And Anthropic keeps innovating. As Fast Company reported, earlier this month, the company launched Claude for Small Business, a new package of agentic workflows that includes skills to automate small business tasks like payroll, marketing, invoicing, contracts, and content strategy. The sky-high valuations and lighting speed at which these companies are raising money speaks to the absolute feeding frenzy that is the AI boom. But will the average investor benefit from these upcoming IPOs? “At the potential prices that have been reported, it would be very difficult for an investor to come out ahead in a three-year period,” economist Jay Ritter, an IPO expert at the University of Florida, told The New York Times. “They may be great as companies but when you buy shares in them, you should pay attention to their price.”