Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude model family, has raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round at a post-money valuation of $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI to become the most valuable privately held artificial intelligence company in the world. OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion in March 2026. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, with Coatue and Iconiq serving as co-leads. Strategic hardware partners Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix also joined the round.

What Is Driving the Valuation

Anthropic's run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month, the company announced in a blog post confirming the raise. That figure represents explosive growth from the $4.8 billion the company reported in Q1 2026 revenue and reinforces the trajectory that led Anthropic to project its first-ever operating profit of $559 million for Q2. The engine behind this growth is enterprise adoption of Claude and Claude Code, with businesses now accounting for approximately 80 percent of total sales.

Amazon committed $5 billion to the funding round as part of its broader commitment to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, a pledge made in April 2026. The investment aligns with Anthropic's commitment to spend more than $100 billion over the next ten years on Amazon Cloud Technologies, making the relationship between the two companies one of the most significant cloud infrastructure partnerships in the current AI cycle.

The Race to an IPO

Anthropic and OpenAI are both understood to be seriously preparing for public listings, according to people familiar with both companies. The pressure to go public is driven by the capital requirements of sustaining global AI platforms at frontier scale. Private funding rounds of the size both companies are raising are significant, but the long-term infrastructure investment required to remain competitive at the frontier of AI development will eventually require access to public capital markets. Both companies are expected to move toward listings later in 2026.



Claude in Nigeria

In Nigeria, Claude has gained significant traction among young professionals and developers, emerging as a preferred alternative to ChatGPT in several use cases. Its capacity for detailed research, document drafting, code generation, and what users describe as more substantive and less agreeable responses has made it a popular tool for students, professionals, and entrepreneurs. The surge in Nigerian adoption reflects a broader global trend: as AI tools mature and differentiate, users are beginning to develop preferences based on genuine capability differences rather than brand familiarity alone.

Where Anthropic Sits in the Broader AI Landscape

NVIDIA remains the world's most valuable AI-related company with a market capitalisation of approximately $4.5 trillion, though as a publicly traded hardware company it occupies a different category from the private AI platform companies. If Anthropic and OpenAI both go public, the gap between AI infrastructure companies and AI platform companies in market valuation terms is likely to narrow, as investor appetite for AI platform equity has been demonstrated by every major private fundraise in the sector over the past two years.