Anthropic is no longer the eternal second fiddle. The company that was always in the shadow of OpenAI has become the main protagonist of this segment in recent months. Its growth is so spectacular that in its latest round of financing it has managed to surpass OpenAI’s valuation. It is an extraordinary milestone, especially for one reason: both hope to go public before the end of the year, and here Anthropic has the upper hand (again).
Overtaking on the right. The company founded by the Amodei brothers has raised a colossal financing round of 65 billion dollarsand with it Anthropic’s valuation becomes 965,000 million post money. It is a financial achievement that suddenly destroys OpenAI’s valuation, which is currently stuck at $730 billion. This latest round comes just three months after Anthropic will raise 30,000 million of dollars, cccadadasdsas in an agreement that placed its valuation at 350,000 million dollars. The growth is simply amazing.
Anthropic is the coolest company. The valuation reflects a compelling reality: Anthropic is (much) more fashionable than OpenAI. The company has taken great advantage of recent controversies to increase its popularity, and its brand image has been greatly reinforced because it is the company that everyone is talking about. What happened to the Pentagon first and what has happened with the encyclical Magnificent Humanitas of the Pope then they show it.
And the one with the best models (seems) to have. OpenAI seemed to be ahead in the AI race with models leading the way. That changed with the arrival of Claude Code and Claude Opus 4.5. Since then, Anthropic’s advances have been striking, and although the differences are small, the popular perception is that Claude Opus is now the model that leads in performance. This has just been confirmed in benchmarks with the recent release of Claude Opus 4.8but above all with Claude Mythos Previewthe model that has been put the world of cybersecurity upside down.
They already make money. A few days ago, surprising news leaked: Anthropic could close the second quarter of the year with an operating profit of 559 million dollars. He would make money when the rest of his rivals lose a lot. The projected annual turnover has managed to exceed $47 billion this month, five times more than the amount estimated at the beginning of the year. The reason: the overwhelming success of Anthropic models in companies. That’s where the money isand the company has known how to 1) detect and 2) take advantage of it before anyone else.
Memory manufacturers enter the round. The financing round is led by venture capital firms such as Greenoaks, Sequoia, Altimeter and Dragoneer, but this time there are other protagonists. These are the semiconductor firms Samsung, Micron and SK Hynixwho have also participated and who have taken advantage of their current privileged position to also bet on the success of Anthropic. It’s a win-win: they bet on the current winning horse, and Anthropic manages to strengthen relationships with the companies that right now they control one of the big bottlenecks of the AI industry: memory chips.
The IPO is imminent. This surprise meteoric intensifies the pressure on OpenAI and further encourages (if that was possible) that other race, which is the IPO of both these two companies and SpaceX. We are in a year that will be remembered for three stratospheric IPOs, but these latest achievements by Anthropic have made the company led by Dario Amodei now the main protagonist in the technology segment.
Image | Fortune Brainstorm Tech
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings