This places the artificial intelligence firm among the world’s most valuable private technology companies ahead of a possible stock market debut.

The Series H round drew backing from investment firms including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue and D1 Capital Partners.

Investors such as Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, DST Global and Fidelity Management & Research also joined the round.

The funding package also includes $15 billion in previously committed investments from large cloud companies, including $5 billion from Amazon announced earlier this year.

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron joined the round as strategic infrastructure partners.

With the funding, Anthropic plans to expand computing capacity, grow its Claude products and continue research into safety and interpretability.

The company announced the funding on the same day it released Claude Opus 4.8, its latest model focused on coding, advanced reasoning and what it described as stronger honesty and self-correction abilities.

Anthropic has expanded rapidly since its last fundraising round in February, helped by rising demand from business customers using Claude Code and other enterprise tools. The company said its annualised revenue run rate passed $47 billion earlier this month.

“Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs,” said Krishna Rao, chief financial officer of Anthropic.

“This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens.”

The company also said it recently signed new agreements with Amazon, Google, Broadcom and SpaceX to secure more computing power as demand for Claude grows.

Under those agreements, Amazon will provide up to five gigawatts of additional capacity, while Google and Broadcom will supply next-generation TPU infrastructure. SpaceX will also provide access to GPU capacity through its Colossus systems.

Anthropic revealed that Claude is now available across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, with AWS remaining its main cloud and training partner.

“Claude’s latest advancements have driven large-scale adoption among the world’s most demanding organisations. This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation and capture the enormous opportunity ahead,” said Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital.

Marc Stad, managing partner at Dragoneer, said, “The technological progress we are seeing right now is breathtaking. And we believe that we are still in the earliest days of both the development and commercialisation of this technology.”

Neil Mehta, founder and managing partner at Greenoaks, added, “Rarely has a company’s culture, mission, and commercial momentum reinforced each other so completely. We are honoured to deepen our partnership.”

With competition increasing among leading artificial intelligence companies seeking more users, stronger computing infrastructure and fresh investment before entering public markets, Anthropic’s latest raise will strengthen its place.

Earlier this year, OpenAI secured a funding round valued at $852 billion after investment, while Elon Musk’s xAI, now merged with SpaceX, has reportedly targeted a $2 trillion valuation ahead of a future public offering.

People familiar with the talks say investors have already made early offers in the range of $850 billion to $900 billion but the company has not accepted any of them.

Discussions are still at an early stage, and nothing has been agreed.

Several investors are trying to secure large stakes, with some offers said to be worth up to $50 billion in new capital. A decision is expected at a board meeting in May.

Anthropic last raised funds in February and that round brought in $30 billion, valuing the company at $380 billion. If this new round goes through at the higher valuation being discussed, it would mark a surge in a matter of months.

The move would also change its position in the market as OpenAI was valued at about $852 billion in March after a major funding round, but a deal at $900 billion would place Anthropic ahead as the most valuable artificial intelligence startup.

The company has received backing from major technology firms. Google has committed billions of dollars, with more funding tied to performance targets. Amazon has also invested heavily and plans to increase its stake over time.

Anthropic declined to comment when contacted.

Revenue growth has supported the surge in investor interest with the company’s annual revenue run rate passing $30 billion earlier this year and is now said to be approaching $40 billion.

Growth has come from demand for its Claude models, especially tools built for coding and business use.

Recent releases include new versions of its core systems and a cybersecurity-focused model with limited access due to safety issues.

There is also a public listing under consideration. Bloomberg reported that an initial public offering could come as soon as October. If that plan holds, this funding round may be the last before the company goes public.

Vercept built tools designed to help AI systems handle complex, multi-step tasks on a computer. Its main product, Vy, allowed an AI agent in the cloud to operate a remote Apple MacBook, completing tasks across live applications.

Now, that product will close on March 25 as the team joins Anthropic.

The startup had already been in the spotlight last year after one of its co-founders, Matt Deitke, left to join Meta. He reportedly negotiated a $250 million pay package to work in Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, drawing attention across the AI industry.

Anthropic said the deal strengthens its push into what it calls “computer use”, enabling its Claude models to work inside real software, much like a person at a keyboard.

In a statement announcing the acquisition, the company said: “Today, we’re announcing that Anthropic has acquired Vercept to help us push those capabilities further.”

Vercept emerged from A12, a Seattle-based AI incubator linked to the Allen Institute for AI. Its founders had previously worked as researchers at the institute.

Over the past year, the startup drew attention in the region and beyond, raising $50 million in total funding, according to chief executive Kiana Ehsani.

The investor list included high-profile technology figures such as former Eric Schmidt chief executive Eric Schmidt, Jeff Dean of Google DeepMind, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, and Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox. A12’s Seth Bannon led the investment and sat on Vercept’s board.

Not all founders will move to Anthropic. The company named Ehsani, Luca Weihs and Ross Girshick among those joining, while others are staying behind.

A former co-founder, Oren Etzioni, also known as the founding head of the Allen Institute and now a professor at the University of Washington, didn’t feel good about how the process unfolded.

Writing on LinkedIn, Etzioni said: “After a little bit more than a year, Vercept is throwing in the towel and giving their customers 30 days to get off the platform. Sad. A fantastic team is joining Anthropic. I wish them the very best!”

He later added: “I’m pleased to have gotten a positive return but obviously disappointed that after just a little over a year with so much traction, and such a fantastic team, we’re basically throwing in the towel.”

His comment triggered a public exchange with Bannon, who defended the founders. In response, Bannon wrote: “… you disparaged the heroic work of the founders for achieving an outcome most could only dream of,” accusing Etzioni of unfair criticism.

The discussion escalated, with both sides trading allegations in the comment thread.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. However, Etzioni said he received a positive return on his investment.

For Anthropic, this is another step in building out its technical bench. In December, it acquired coding agent engine Bun to support Claude Code. The company says its latest model, Claude Sonnet 4.6, has sharply improved its ability to navigate software environments.

On OSWorld, a benchmark used to test computer-use skills, Anthropic said its Sonnet models improved from under 15% in late 2024 to 72.5% today.

Ehsani, for her part, described the decision as strategic. In her LinkedIn post, she wrote: “The choices were clear: we could build independently and work toward the same vision as two separate versions of it, or join forces with an incredible team and accelerate that vision into reality. The decision became an easy choice.”

Under the agreement, Anthropic will commit $30 billion to purchase Azure cloud services, including up to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity powered by Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips.

Nvidia will invest as much as $10 billion into Anthropic, while Microsoft’s stake reaches $5 billion. The companies have not disclosed exact timelines or detailed terms, but the scale makes this partnership as one of the largest infrastructure deals in the AI sector to date.

“We’re very excited to get additional capacity that we can use both to train our models to support Microsoft first party products and to sell together,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a YouTube video accompanying the announcement.

This investment boosts the rivalry with OpenAI, which recently signed a $38 billion deal with Amazon Web Services. OpenAI has plans to expand computing resources, targeting 30 gigawatts, enough to power roughly 25 million U.S. homes. 

Anthropic’s cloud commitment places it as a multi-cloud alternative for enterprises seeking Claude alongside GPT-based services.

Analysts note that these deals show the current situation of circular investments in AI, where cloud providers fund startups that, in turn, commit to massive cloud spending. 

This has led to concerns about overvaluation and the sustainability of current growth, particularly as some investors exit their AI holdings. Peter Thiel’s hedge fund sold its Nvidia stake in Q3, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has also reduced exposure to Nvidia, though reinvesting in OpenAI.

Beyond financial backing, Nvidia and Anthropic will collaborate closely to optimise Claude models for next-generation chip architectures, ensuring maximum performance and efficiency. Microsoft’s investment expands its AI portfolio beyond OpenAI, a pivot to diversify partnerships as competition and evolving governance demands increase.

Anthropic’s Claude models are viewed as rivals to ChatGPT, particularly in enterprise applications where safety and reliability are essential. With heavy funding and multi-cloud partnerships, Anthropic is now among the most well-capitalised AI startups globally.

The company’s growth is being driven by surging enterprise adoption and a portfolio of cost-efficient AI models.

According to internal projections cited by two people familiar with the company’s financial outlook, Anthropic aims to close 2025 with an annualised revenue run rate of $9 billion, up from $5 billion in August and $7 billion this month. 

Per Reuters, management is targeting a base case of $20 billion, with an upper target of $26 billion for 2026, trusting in sustained enterprise demand.

The San Francisco-based company confirmed that revenue growth is accelerating but declined to comment on future targets. Anthropic and many other businesses are embedding generative AI tools into their operations, even though the sustainability of industry-wide investment levels is being questioned.

A key contributor to this growth is Anthropic’s enterprise product line, which now serves over 300,000 business and corporate users, a segment that contributes roughly 80% of total revenue. 

Its Claude Code product, a coding assistant introduced earlier this year, has already achieved a $1 billion annualised run rate, showing the appetite for automation tools that improve developer productivity.

In a move to reach more cost-sensitive clients, Anthropic recently launched Claude Haiku 4.5, the latest version of its smallest AI model. The model is priced at about one-third the cost of Sonnet 4, making it attractive for companies seeking high performance without steep infrastructure costs. 

Haiku 4.5 is optimised for low-latency applications, rapid prototyping, and multi-agent systems, core needs for businesses deploying AI at scale.

This expansion boosts Anthropic as one of OpenAI’s closest competitors. OpenAI’s annualised revenue exceeded $13 billion in August, with projections of reaching $20 billion by year-end, largely powered by ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly active users.

Investor enthusiasm has kept pace with Anthropic’s financial course. In a Series F funding round led by ICONIQ, the company raised $13 billion, pushing its valuation to $183 billion, a jump from $61.5 billion just six months earlier. 

Major backers include Google’s parent Alphabet and Amazon, both of which have strategic partnerships with the company.

Anthropic is also looking beyond the U.S. In August, the firm announced plans to offer its Claude model to the U.S. government for $1, a symbolic gesture signalling its commitment to public sector collaboration. 

The company also revealed plans to open an office in Bengaluru, India, in 2026, its first in Asia and second-largest market after the U.S. To support this expansion, Anthropic intends to triple its international workforce and grow its applied AI team fivefold this year.

The company disclosed these findings in its August 2025 Threat Intelligence Report, raising fresh alarms over the fast-growing misuse of artificial intelligence in cybercrime.

According to the report, attackers attempted to manipulate Claude into: drafting phishing emails with psychological precision, generating and debugging malicious code, bypassing filters through repeated prompts, producing persuasive propaganda posts at scale, and even guiding inexperienced hackers with step-by-step instructions. 

In one case, Claude Code was used in a campaign that targeted 17 organisations, from healthcare providers to government agencies, with ransom demands reaching $500,000.

Anthropic confirmed that its security defences intercepted the activity. Compromised accounts were banned, high-risk prompts blocked, and restrictions placed on access to financial, adult, and pirated content. 

The company also introduced mandatory confirmation for risky actions such as publishing or sharing sensitive personal data. These measures, it said, cut the success rate of prompt injections from 23.6% to 11.2%, a notable improvement in system resilience.

The company explained: “We will continue publishing reports whenever we detect major threats. Our goal is to help the wider community understand how these systems may be exploited and how to stop them.”

Earlier this year, Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service was breached, allowing hackers to generate harmful content by sidestepping safeguards. OpenAI, in June, launched a dedicated initiative to combat malicious use of AI in covert operations and cyber espionage. 

Google’s Gemini has also faced issues for what was described as inadequate transparency in its safety measures.

Governments are now stepping in. The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act began enforcement on 2 August 2025. It introduces strict risk management rules for general-purpose AI, cybersecurity-by-design requirements for high-risk systems, and penalties of up to €35 million or 7% of global turnover. 

In the United States, the White House has secured voluntary commitments from major AI developers, but critics argue that only binding regulation will close the gap between safeguards and threats.

With AI models becoming more powerful, the line between innovation and exploitation will only grow sharper.

The company announced the research preview on Tuesday, saying that 1,000 subscribers on its Max plan, priced between $100 and $200 per month, will be the first to gain access. A waitlist is also open for others.

Through a Chrome extension, selected users can summon Claude in a sidebar window that stays in sync with their browsing activity. The agent can summarise pages, interact with content, and, when granted permission, even perform tasks inside the browser.

The browser is quickly becoming a focal point in the competition among AI developers. Perplexity recently released its own AI-powered browser, Comet, while Google has integrated Gemini into Chrome, and OpenAI is reportedly working on its own AI-driven browser. 

These reveal browsing has gone beyond search to handing over routine actions to automated systems.

For Anthropic, the launch is also about safety. The company admitted that browser-based agents carry real risks, including prompt injection attacks, where hidden instructions in a web page could trick the AI into carrying out harmful commands. 

Internal testing showed such attacks succeeded 23.6% of the time before mitigations. Anthropic now claims it has cut that rate to 11.2% by introducing several layers of defence.

Among them are site-level restrictions, default blocks on financial services, adult, and pirated content, and mandatory confirmations for sensitive actions such as publishing, payments, or sharing personal data. “Claude will always ask for explicit permission before taking high-risk actions,” Anthropic said in its blog post.

Google’s Chrome browser, which tops global market share, is at the centre of an antitrust case that could force the company to sell the product. If that happens, ownership of Chrome could reshape the competitive landscape. 

Perplexity has already placed an unsolicited $34.5 billion bid for Chrome, while OpenAI’s Sam Altman has said his company would also be willing to buy it.

This isn’t Anthropic’s first attempt to give its models control over a user’s screen. Last year, the firm tested a desktop-based agent that could operate a PC, but the early version was criticised for being sluggish and inconsistent. 

Since then, the “agentic AI” has advanced considerably, with systems like Comet and ChatGPT’s Agent showing more reliability in handling everyday digital tasks, even if they continue to struggle with more complex scenarios.

Analysts see Anthropic’s decision to limit Claude for Chrome to premium subscribers as a sign of where the industry is heading: towards new business models built around productivity tools, enterprise automation, and personalised web experiences. 

Gartner has projected that the AI security market could reach $15 billion by 2027, driven largely by demand for safe, agentic systems.

The agreement is similar to OpenAI’s move, which recently made its ChatGPT Enterprise product available to participating agencies under the same pricing model.

The offer extends to the executive, legislative and judicial arms of government. While there is no requirement for agencies to adopt Claude, the deal opens the door for lawmakers, judges and federal workers to integrate the chatbot into day-to-day operations for sensitive but unclassified tasks.

“America’s AI leadership requires that our government institutions have access to the most capable, secure AI tools available,” said Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei. “By offering expanded Claude access across all three branches of government, we’re helping the federal workforce leverage frontier AI capabilities.”

The GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service commissioner, Josh Gruenbaum, said affordability would speed adoption. “The price is going to help uptake from agencies happen that much quicker,” he noted.

Claude has already been deployed in select agencies, including the Department of Defense, and is approved under the FedRAMP High security standard. The government recently added Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini to its Multiple Award Schedule, making them official suppliers for AI procurement.

Tech giants see little direct profit from such low-cost agreements. However, they gain valuable insight into how AI is applied in high-value government use cases, intelligence that could change future enterprise products or renewals once the current deals expire.

Discussions are ongoing with other providers, including Meta’s Llama, Elon Musk’s xAI’s Grok, and smaller niche AI platforms. Google is also reportedly negotiating a similar offer for its Gemini chatbot.

The approval process comes against a political backdrop. The White House has pledged to block AI systems found to have “partisan bias or ideological agendas” from doing business with the federal government. 

Critics of existing models, including some of former President Donald Trump’s allies, have claimed that tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini lean towards liberal viewpoints.

Government officials have stressed that approval for procurement does not indicate preference for any particular platform and that all approved models remain subject to ongoing bias reviews.

In contrast, OpenAI’s GPT-4 generates 25 times more emissions per query, pointing out issues about the environmental cost of advanced AI models.

A recent analysis by TRG Datacenters compared the carbon footprints of various AI models, measuring emissions from individual queries based on standard energy grid assumptions. The results reveal a gap in efficiency, with some models demanding far more power than others.

The AI Carbon Footprint Breakdown

AI chatbots differ widely in how much energy they consume during inference. Here’s how they rank in terms of CO2 emissions per query:

• Grok AI – 0.17g
• Google Gemini – 1.6g
• LLaMA (Meta AI) – 3.2g
• Claude AI – 3.5g
• Perplexity AI – 4g
• ChatGPT (GPT-4) – 4.32g

Grok AI’s low emissions result from its simplified computational design, which reduces power usage while maintaining performance. In practical terms, a single query on Grok produces the same emissions as a basic Google search, making it the greenest option in the market.

Meanwhile, Google Gemini ranks second, emitting 1.6g of CO2 per query. Google’s heavy investment in renewable energy and custom AI hardware helps curb its carbon footprint, though it still lags behind Grok.

Meta’s LLaMA model follows at 3.2g CO2 per query, benefiting from Meta’s commitment to renewable energy but still consuming twice as much power as Gemini. Claude AI ranks slightly worse, producing 3.5g CO2 per query, with its emphasis on safety and reliability seemingly driving up computational costs.

At the higher end of the spectrum, Perplexity AI (4g CO2 per query) and ChatGPT (4.32g CO2 per query) stand out for their environmental impact. GPT-4, in particular, has the highest carbon footprint among the chatbots studied. 

Its computational intensity, deep learning architecture, and search feature demand massive energy resources, generating emissions equivalent to sending 21 emails or nearly a full phone charge per query.

A spokesperson from TRG Datacenters commented on the findings:

“As AI adoption continues to rise, finding ways to reduce its energy consumption will be key. Some models are already designed to be more efficient, but there is still room for improvement. Advances in hardware, more optimized AI models, and increased use of renewable energy in data centres could help lower emissions over time. AI is here to stay, but balancing innovation with sustainability will be essential in minimizing its environmental impact.”

With AI usage skyrocketing, energy efficiency is becoming a big issue. While Grok AI sets the benchmark for low-carbon performance, larger models like GPT-4 highlight the environmental trade-offs that come with high-powered AI capabilities.

The resilience of AI sustainability will probably depend on hardware improvements, algorithmic optimisations, and increased reliance on green energy. For now, the numbers show that not all AI models are created equal, and some come with a much heavier environmental cost than others.