Anthropic Raises $65 Billion in Series H and Surpasses OpenAI with a Valuation of $965 Billion

Anthropic has raised $65 billion in Series H with a post-money valuation of $965 billion, according to a statement from the company on 28 May, making it the world's most valuable artificial intelligence startup, ahead of OpenAI for the first time. Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital led the round. Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN co-led. Annualised revenue crossed $47 billion in May, as reported by the company.

The Check That No Private Deal Has Ever Written Before

A single equity round of $65 billion has no historical parallel in the private market, even within the current AI funding cycle. Anthropic acknowledged in the statement that $15 billion came from previously agreed commitments with hyperscalers, including $5 billion from Amazon, which maintains its status as a preferred provider of training via AWS Trainium. The Series G, closed in February this year, had already placed Anthropic back into the trillion-dollar valuation conversation, and the Series H consolidated the position within three months.

The declared use of the capital by the company includes research into safety and interpretability, expansion of compute resources to meet demand for Claude, and scaling partnerships with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. These three channels distribute Claude via Bedrock, Vertex AI, and Foundry and account for a significant portion of the enterprise integrations recorded by the company, which includes Deloitte, Replit, Cursor, Notion, and Snowflake as nominal paying clients in the institutional material.

The Memory Layer Rises in the Cap Table

Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix entered as strategic investors, in an unusual move for semiconductor suppliers. Anthropic described the three as partners whose technologies "play a critical role in the global supply of memory, storage, and logic." For capacity planning teams in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, the signal is clear: the allocation of wafer and HBM for the next three years remains concentrated under multi-year contracts, and Anthropic has just secured its share directly in the cap table of those producing the input.

Pricing pressure arrives in Latin America. Operations of integrators and capacity resellers on AWS Bedrock in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil will feel any pricing adjustments on Claude's inference line before any official communications. For CIOs who have already productised service flows and internal copilots based on Claude Sonnet or Haiku, the fiscal year 2027 gains an additional risk vector in the unit cost per query line.

The IPO and What It Forces in Enterprise Contracts

TechCrunch reported that the round was also structured in preparation for an IPO, with no public timeline. According to the company, the opening brings three relevant contractual changes for Anthropic's installed base. The first is audited disclosure of uptime and SLAs by region. The second is the exposure of gross profit margins in quarterly filings, given that corporate clients will demand transparency on token costs in long-term packages. The third is the governance regime of IP around training data, which will need to withstand discovery in pending litigation in the United States and Europe.

The next response will come from OpenAI. In February of this year, the company was valued at around $500 billion in secondary markets, according to Reuters' report at the time. A new round above this mark would reposition the competition within weeks. If it does not come, the first half of 2026 marks the first cycle since 2023 in which the symbolic leader of the generative AI segment is not named OpenAI.

Readers managing inference budgets in banking technology or consulting should draw two operational conclusions from the announcement. First: the price of the Claude Opus token, set at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output in generation 4.8, is covered by multi-year commitments with the memory offer and has protection against pricing spikes in the short term. Second: the window for negotiating enterprise contracts before the IPO is the last cycle in which Anthropic sells without needing to declare margin per SKU.