CEO and Co-Founder of Anthropic Dario Amodei speaks during the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 20, 2026.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
OpenAI has the largest private tech fundraising round on record. Rival Anthropic now has the second.
Anthropic announced on Thursday the close of a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion post-money valuation, more than double what the artificial intelligence company was worth in September, when it last raised money.
The company behind Claude is trying to keep pace with OpenAI, which last year closed a round of more than $40 billion led by SoftBank. The largest private deal before that was Ant Group’s $14 billion capital raise in 2018.
Developing and training AI models is extremely expensive, which is a big reason why Anthropic and OpenAI continue raising such large sums, as they have to pour money into computing resources like Nvidia’s graphics processing units. They’re also engaged in fierce competition with Google, which has announced plans to shell out up to $185 billion this year in capital expenditures, and is investing heavily in its Gemini products.
Anthropic’s most recent funding round was led by Coatue and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, according to a release. D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ and MGX also participated.
Anthropic said the round includes “a portion” of the previously announced investments from Microsoft and Nvidia, which said in November that they plan to commit up to $5 billion and up to $10 billion, respectively.
Founded by a group of former OpenAI researchers and executives in 2021, Anthropic has had early success selling to enterprises, while OpenAI has largely been a consumer company, thanks to ChatGPT’s popularity. Anthropic’s annualized revenue has climbed to $14 billion, the company said, after revenue last year reached roughly $10 billion.
“Whether it is entrepreneurs, startups, or the world’s largest enterprises, the message from our customers is the same: Claude is increasingly becoming more critical to how businesses work,” Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said in a statement. “This fundraising reflects the incredible demand we are seeing from these customers.”
The company said the fresh capital will support Anthropic’s infrastructure expansion, research and its continued investment in enterprise-grade products.
OpenAI is also engaged in fundraising talks with investors for a round that could close at around $100 billion, as CNBC previously reported. The company has to pad its cash position after inking $1.4 trillion worth of infrastructure deals last year.
Anthropic gets about 80% of its business from enterprises, CEO Dario Amodei told CNBC last month. That’s partly thanks to the company’s viral AI coding tool, Claude Code, which can automate parts of the software development process.
Claude Code’s annualized revenue has increased to $2.5 billion, and business subscriptions have quadrupled since the start of the year, Anthropic said Thursday. Enterprise users represent more than half of Claude Code’s revenue.
The coding tool’s popularity, as well as advancements within Anthropic’s productivity offering, Claude Cowork, have contributed to a massive selloff in software stocks in recent months. The sector has lost around $2 trillion of market capitalization from its peak as investors grow concerned about AI’s potential to disrupt those businesses.
OpenAI, meanwhile, has been aggressively touting its competing AI coding tool, Codex, in an effort to keep up. OpenAI launched a new Codex model, GPT‑5.3-Codex, last week, as well as a stand-alone app for users with Apple computers.
Anthropic earlier this month unveiled its most recent model, Claude Opus 4.6, which the company says is better at coding and creating higher-quality professional work products and outputs.
“The demand we are seeing from enterprises and developers reflects the trust they place in Claude for the work that matters most,” Anthropic said Thursday. “As AI moves toward scaled implementation, we will continue to build the models, products, and partnerships to lead that transition.”
