Anthropic is set to close a funding round exceeding $30 billion at a valuation above $900 billion as soon as next week, according to Bloomberg — a deal that would vault the Claude maker past OpenAI to become the world's most valuable private artificial intelligence company, and would do so on the same week its chief rival filed confidentially for an initial public offering.
Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Altimeter Capital, and Greenoaks Capital Partners are each expected to contribute roughly $2 billion as co-leads, with existing investors including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and General Catalyst also anticipated to participate. The round came together in a matter of weeks, a sign of strong investor demand for the Claude maker.
On Friday, May 22, OpenAI filed its IPO prospectus confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the offering and a public listing targeting as early as September 2026. Both frontier AI companies are now racing toward public markets before the end of the year.
Anthropic Valuation 2026: A Trajectory That Rewrites the Record Books
The speed of Anthropic's ascent is nearly without precedent. The company was valued at $61.5 billion in March 2025. By September it had reached $183 billion in its Series F. In February 2026 it closed a $30 billion Series G — led by Singapore's GIC and Coatue Management — at $380 billion post-money, what Crunchbase described as the second-largest private financing round in history. If this round closes on reported terms, Anthropic's valuation will have grown roughly 15-fold in approximately 14 months.
OpenAI, whose $120 billion round in March valued it at $852 billion, has held the title of the world's most valuable AI startup — but not for much longer if Anthropic's deal closes as expected.
Claude Code Revenue: The Product Behind the Surge
The Wall Street Journal first reported, and CNBC confirmed, that Anthropic is on track to generate $10.9 billion in revenue in the second quarter alone — more than double its Q1 figure of $4.8 billion, and more than its entire 2025 revenue. Anthropic has told investors that its annualized run rate will surpass $50 billion by the end of June, a figure that reflects projected continued within-quarter growth rather than a simple annualization of the Q2 quarterly total. The company's annualized revenue stood at roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 and crossed $30 billion by early April 2026.
For context: Salesforce took roughly two decades to reach $30 billion in annual revenue. Anthropic did it in under three years — a pace that CEO Dario Amodei said at a developer conference this month reflected "80x growth" in annualized revenue and usage in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
The revenue numbers carry important caveats. Anthropic's accounting methods are not publicly audited — the company is not yet required to follow public-company financial-reporting standards. Tech journalist Ed Zitron published a detailed analysis arguing that the projected Q2 operating profit is a non-GAAP, one-time result tied to a temporary compute cost discount from a newly signed infrastructure deal with SpaceX, and that the company's underlying cost structure — where infrastructure expenses scale roughly proportionally with revenue — has not fundamentally changed. Anthropic's CFO also declared under oath in a March 2026 court filing that the company had brought in revenues "exceeding $5 billion to date," a figure some analysts have found difficult to reconcile with the current quarterly projections. The Wall Street Journal itself noted at the time that it was unclear which accounting methods Anthropic had used to book revenue and costs.
Much of the recent revenue acceleration traces back to a single product: Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic AI coding tool that became generally available in May 2025. Claude Code hit $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months of public launch and was generating over $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue by February 2026, according to Anthropic's own Series G announcement. It is now widely credited as one of the fastest-scaling commercial software products on record. Enterprise customers now represent approximately 80% of Anthropic's revenue. More than 1,000 businesses are spending over $1 million annually on its services — a figure that doubled in under two months following the February Series G close.
The Claude model family is available across all three major cloud platforms — AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure — giving enterprise customers an unusual degree of infrastructure optionality.
Anthropic vs OpenAI: Race to Public Markets
The funding round is widely expected to be Anthropic's final private raise before an IPO. Bloomberg reported in March that the company is eyeing a public listing as early as October 2026, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley in early discussions about underwriting roles; the offering could raise more than $60 billion, ranking among the largest technology listings in history.
OpenAI's confidential S-1 filing on May 22 — the same day Bloomberg reported Anthropic's imminent round close — sets up one of the most closely watched rivalry narratives in years: two frontier AI companies, both targeting Q4 2026 public listings, both carrying valuations approaching or exceeding $1 trillion. Anthropic's shares were already trading on secondary markets at an implied $1 trillion valuation earlier this month, driven by explosive revenue growth and a severe supply-demand imbalance in available private shares.
Big Tech Commitments Provide the Floor
The new round comes on top of substantial commitments from Big Tech, neither of which is expected to participate in the current financing. Amazon agreed in April 2026 to invest an additional $5 billion immediately, with up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones, bringing total Amazon financial commitments above $30 billion when combined with prior investments. Google committed up to $40 billion in April, including a $10 billion immediate investment at a $350 billion valuation, with the remainder contingent on performance targets. Together, these commitments provide critical cloud infrastructure — the secured GPU and TPU capacity needed to sustain Anthropic's model training at scale — alongside the capital.
Legal Risks That Will Follow Anthropic to Public Markets
Any S-1 filing will require Anthropic to disclose a set of legal risks that investors are already tracking. The company reached a $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic — a class-action alleging that pirated books were used without authorization to train Claude — with a final approval hearing held May 14, 2026. Separately, Universal Music Group, BMG, and Concord filed a $3 billion lawsuit in early 2026 alleging large-scale copyright infringement involving song lyrics and sheet music; founders Dario and Daniela Amodei are named individually.
Anthropic is also suing the U.S. Department of Defense, which designated the company a supply chain risk in March 2026 after the company declined to allow its technology to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of American citizens. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the designation, but the case remains active. Anthropic estimated the dispute put hundreds of millions to multiple billions of dollars of 2026 revenue at risk.
What Comes Next for Anthropic
At a $900 billion valuation, a successful IPO would place Anthropic among the most valuable public companies on earth. The path there depends on sustaining a revenue trajectory that is historically extraordinary, absorbing rising compute costs once the discounted SpaceX infrastructure rates normalize, navigating active intellectual-property litigation, and competing for enterprise customers against OpenAI, Google, Meta, and xAI — each of which is spending aggressively on its own models.
For enterprise technology buyers, the Anthropic story represents the clearest signal yet that agentic AI coding tools have moved from experiment to critical infrastructure. For investors with access to secondary markets or the upcoming IPO, the question is not whether Anthropic's growth is real — the revenue trajectory is independently reported and remarkable — but whether a $900 billion entry price already captures most of it.
The industry is watching to see whether next week brings the close Bloomberg's sources are describing, and whether the two AI giants that have defined the current investment cycle both reach public markets before the year is out.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Anthropic's current valuation?
Anthropic's last confirmed private valuation was $380 billion, set during its $30 billion Series G in February 2026. The new funding round expected to close as soon as the week of May 26, 2026, is being negotiated at a pre-money valuation above $900 billion — which would make it the most valuable private AI startup in the world, surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion valuation from March.
What is Anthropic's revenue in 2026?
Anthropic reported $4.8 billion in first-quarter 2026 revenue and is projected to generate $10.9 billion in the second quarter, per the Wall Street Journal and CNBC. Anthropic has told investors its annualized run rate will exceed $50 billion by the end of June. These figures are unaudited and based on non-GAAP accounting methods not yet subject to public-company reporting requirements.
When will Anthropic go public?
Anthropic is targeting an IPO as early as October 2026, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley in early discussions as underwriters. The current funding round is widely expected to be its final private raise. No S-1 has been filed publicly as of May 23, 2026.
How does Claude Code drive Anthropic's revenue?
Claude Code, Anthropic's terminal-native agentic coding assistant, became generally available in May 2025 and reached $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months — faster than any comparable enterprise software product on record. By February 2026 it had reached $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue and is now the primary engine of Anthropic's enterprise growth, accounting for a significant share of the more than 1,000 businesses spending over $1 million annually on Anthropic services.
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