Anthropic hits a $380B valuation as it heightens competition with OpenAI

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic says it is now valued at $380 billion, cementing its position alongside rival OpenAI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in a trio of the world’s most valuable startups that investors will be watching closely this year to see if they will become publicly traded on Wall Street.

“These are the three biggest names that could go public this year,” said Angelo Bochanis, an associate at Renaissance Capital, which researches the potential for initial public offerings.

Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, said Thursday its valuation grew after it raised $30 billion in its latest round of funding, led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and the U.S.-based investment firm Coatue, along with dozens of other major investors.

The funding also includes a portion of the $15 billion that Nvidia and Microsoft said they would invest in Anthropic in November, part of a deal that would eventually commit Anthropic to buying from Microsoft some $30 billion in computing capacity it needs to build and run AI systems like Claude. Anthropic has also been heavily backed by cloud providers Amazon and Google.

Anthropic’s chief financial officer Krishna Rao says the company will use the surge of investments to continue building “enterprise-grade products” and AI models.

Renaissance Capital counts Anthropic as third among the most valuable private firms. It’s behind ChatGPT maker OpenAI, valued at $500 billion. Both San Francisco-based AI companies trail rocket maker SpaceX, which recently merged with Musk’s AI startup xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok.

Anthropic isn’t profitable but said Thursday it is on track for sales of $14 billion over the next year, a rapid rise from “its first dollar in revenue” that came less than three years ago. While OpenAI has dabbled in a number of revenue models, including digital advertising, Anthropic has tailored Claude products to be a workplace assistant on tasks such as software engineering.

Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI employees in 2021. Its co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has promised a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms aimed to build. Anthropic also this week announced a new $20 million bipartisan organization to influence AI regulation in the United States.

OpenAI first released ChatGPT in late 2022, revealing the huge commercial potential of AI large language models that could help write emails and computer code and answer questions. Anthropic followed that with its first version of Claude in 2023.

Whichever company is first to do an initial public offering will have “an opportunity to raise even more money,” Bochanis said. “It’s an opportunity to be a big headline and get that sort of boost to your public image.”

The risks are that they’ll have to invite public inspection of their business models as they continue to lose more money than they make.

“Private markets have been throwing dozens of billions of dollars at these companies, even as valuations multiply again and again and again,” Bochanis said. “With public markets, there’s going to be a little more scrutiny. A single earnings report could tank a stock.”