Anthropic, the creator of the Claude AI models, is courting a summer funding round that could lift its pre‑money valuation to roughly $900bn, edging past OpenAI. The startup, valued at $380bn in February, has seen revenue accelerate toward an annualised $45bn, a five‑fold jump from a year ago. Venture firms Dragoneer, General Catalyst and Lightspeed are among the suitors in the AI sector globally.

Investors say they are ready to commit “any dollar amount,” waiting for Anthropic to signal readiness. Sources expect the round to raise as much as $50bn and close within two months, though CFO Krishna Rao has not locked in terms. OpenAI’s March post‑money valuation stood at $852bn after a $122bn raise, underscoring the scale of the contest.

To finance a surge in compute capacity, Anthropic has secured agreements with SpaceXAI, Google, Broadcom and AWS, aiming to avoid the bottlenecks that recently throttled service. The influx of capital would also fund the broader rollout of its Mythos model and position the company for an IPO as early as year‑end, a move that could reshape the AI market hierarchy.