Anthropic Is Now Worth More Than OpenAI

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, has raised $65 billion in fresh funding. The round values it at $965 billion and makes it the most valuable AI startup in the world, ahead of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, which was last valued at $852 billion in March. The money came from a group led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, and Anthropic says it will spend it on research and on the enormous computing power Claude now needs. The raise pushes it past OpenAI as the highest-valued company in the field.

It capped a defining few days. On the same day, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8, which it calls its strongest coding model yet. It also revealed that its run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion. That figure is an annualised estimate based on recent months, not audited annual sales, a distinction I will come back to.

Let me be upfront about my own position, because it shapes how I read all this. For most of the past few years I reached for ChatGPT first. When Google’s Gemini launched, it became my backup. Over recent months that order flipped. For the work I actually do, which is thinking through messy problems, planning, designing and anything involving code, Claude has become the tool I open first. ChatGPT and Gemini now feel like the fallbacks. The revenue numbers suggest I am far from alone.

How a breakaway overtook the company it left

Anthropic exists because of an argument inside OpenAI. In 2021, a group of senior staff led by the siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI and founded it. Dario had been OpenAI’s vice president of research and helped build the early GPT models. Daniela had run safety and policy. They left, with several colleagues, over disagreements about how fast AI was being pushed and how seriously safety was being treated, concerns that sharpened after OpenAI took a large investment from Microsoft. The pitch was simple. You could build powerful AI while treating safety as the core of the product rather than an afterthought.

For a long time that looked like the slow, cautious path while OpenAI raced ahead with ChatGPT. The bet has aged well. Anthropic chose to focus on businesses rather than chasing a mass consumer audience. Its breakout product, the coding tool Claude Code, turned that focus into money quickly. Company revenue went from roughly $1 billion at the start of 2025 to a $47 billion run-rate today. By most accounts it is one of the fastest revenue climbs the software industry has ever recorded.

What “bigger” does and does not mean

Here is the honest truth: Anthropic is now bigger than OpenAI as a business. It has a higher private valuation, and it actually overtook OpenAI on revenue back in April, at around $30 billion to OpenAI’s $25 billion. But ChatGPT is still far bigger as a product. OpenAI has more than 900 million weekly users. Claude has roughly 19 million monthly users on the web, plus several million more on its apps. OpenAI has more than fifty times the audience and still earns less, because Anthropic’s customers are companies paying serious money rather than individuals on $20 plans. Consumer scale and revenue are not the same thing.

The new model, briefly

Opus 4.8 scores 69.2% on SWE-Bench Pro, a tough coding test, up from 64.3% for the previous version and ahead of OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro. Anthropic’s more interesting claim is about honesty. It says the model is about four times less likely to let a bug in its own code slip past without flagging it. The company also confirmed it will widen access to Claude Mythos, a far more powerful model with cyberattack abilities so strong it has kept it restricted, in the coming weeks. Alongside the model, Anthropic added finer control over how much effort Claude puts into a task, including a Claude Code setting it calls ultracode.

What this costs in Kenya

For local readers, the practical question is what Claude costs here. The standard Pro plan is listed at $20 a month, which is roughly KES 2,600 at current rates, and closer to KES 3,000 once Kenya’s 16% VAT on digital services is added. Bank foreign exchange markups push it a little higher again. There is a capable free tier, and the heavier Max plans run from $100 to $200 a month for people who lean on Claude all day. The weak shilling means every dollar-priced AI tool keeps getting more expensive in local terms, which is worth weighing before stacking several subscriptions.

Why this could still be a bubble

Now, while it’s all shiny and exciting, a $965 billion valuation is a bet on the future, not a measure of profit. Both Anthropic and OpenAI lose vast sums running these models. The AI situation currently leans heavily on circular deals, where AI firms, chipmakers and cloud providers invest in one another. Anthropic’s own raise shows the pattern. Of the $65 billion, $15 billion was money already committed by cloud giants, including $5 billion from Amazon. The company has also signed deals for gigawatts of computing power from Amazon, from Google and Broadcom, and from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Investors and bankers expect this to be Anthropic’s last big private round before a stock market listing, possibly this year. If demand cools, or if the cost of running these models does not fall, today’s valuations could look very different. Being the most valuable AI startup and being a sound business are not yet the same thing.

The ripple effects are already here

Pressure from Anthropic and OpenAI has forced the giants to move. Google has poured resources into Gemini and is suddenly back in the conversation. Apple, which fell behind badly on AI, made the most telling move of all. Rather than fix Siri in-house, it is paying Google a reported $1 billion a year, about KES 130 billion, for a custom version of Gemini to power the assistant. We covered that deal when Google confirmed the Gemini-powered Siri was still on track for 2026.

What to watch from here is straightforward. Anthropic has the lead on money, and for many of us on the product itself. The open questions are whether its revenue keeps climbing fast enough to justify a price tag near one trillion dollars, and whether either lab can turn that revenue into actual profit before its investors expect returns. The valuation answers neither of those yet. When the IPO filing arrives, that is where the numbers that matter will finally be public.