Anthropic valued at $965B after $65B funding round

Anthropic has secured a landmark $65 billion funding round, pushing its valuation to $965 billion and surpassing rival OpenAI to become the world's most valuable AI startup. The company, founded five years ago by former OpenAI employees Dario and Daniela Amodei, has seen extraordinary growth, with its valuation jumping from $350 billion just three months ago. The funding round, led by venture capital firms including Greenoaks, Sequoia, Altimeter, and Dragoneer, also attracted semiconductor manufacturers Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, who are betting on Anthropic as the current leader in the AI race while seeking to strengthen ties with memory chip suppliers critical to the industry's infrastructure. The milestone marks a dramatic reversal in the competitive landscape between Anthropic and OpenAI, which had long dominated the AI sector. Anthropic's rise has been fueled by the success of its Claude models in the enterprise market, particularly since the launch of powerful coding assistants late last year. The company is on track to generate $47 billion in annualized revenue this month, five times more than estimated at the start of the year, and could close the second quarter with $559 million in operating profit while competitors continue to burn cash. OpenAI, meanwhile, has shifted strategy by abandoning consumer projects like the Sora video generator and its Disney partnership to focus on the corporate market, though it still maintains 900 million weekly active users, including 50 million paying subscribers. Both companies are now locked in a race to go public, competing not only with each other but also with Elon Musk's SpaceX for a share of investor attention in what promises to be a historic year for technology IPOs. OpenAI, valued at $852 billion following its March funding round, expects to reach profitability by 2030 when it projects $284 billion in revenue, though documents cited by The Wall Street Journal reveal it estimates annual costs of $121 billion by 2028. Anthropic has also positioned itself as the more safety-conscious alternative in the AI sector, clashing with the Pentagon over its refusal to remove safeguards against mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons, while investing millions in lobbying activities to advocate for greater government oversight of the technology.