Anthropic has raised $13 billion in a Series F financing, bringing its valuation to $183 billion and making it one of the most valuable startups in the world. The round was co-led by Iconiq, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other investors included GIC, Insight Partners, BlackRock, Blackstone, Qatar Investment Authority, and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.
“We are seeing exponential growth in demand across our entire customer base,” Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said. “This financing demonstrates investors’ extraordinary confidence in our financial performance and the strength of their collaboration with us to continue fueling our unprecedented growth”.
Anthropic last raised $3.5 billion in March at a $61.5 billion valuation. In less than six months, its worth has nearly tripled. The company said its run-rate revenue has grown from $1 billion at the start of the year to over $5 billion by August. It now counts more than 300,000 business customers, with the number of large accounts nearly seven-fold in the past year.
The surge has been driven in part by Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding assistant launched earlier this year. The company said Claude Code is already generating more than $500 million in run-rate revenue and that usage has grown more than ten-fold in just three months. Independent benchmarks back up its performance. In July, Anthropic disclosed that Claude Opus 4.1, the model powering Claude Code, achieved a 74.5% score on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark, topping OpenAI’s o3 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro.
“Enterprise leaders tell us what we’re seeing firsthand: Claude is reliable, built on a trustworthy foundation, and guided by leaders truly focused on the long term,” said Divesh Makan, a partner at Iconiq, which led the investment.
While OpenAI has focused heavily on consumer adoption, Anthropic has targeted enterprises in finance, healthcare, and government. Competition is intensifying. In August, OpenAI released GPT-5, designed with stronger coding abilities, a domain that has been central to Anthropic’s growth. Bloomberg reported last month that OpenAI is in talks to let employees and early investors sell shares at a valuation of about $500 billion, which would make it the world’s most valuable startup.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI is seeking a valuation as high as $200 billion in its next fundraising, according to people familiar with the matter. Cohere, another rival focused on enterprise AI, raised $500 million in August at a $6.8 billion valuation. Mistral, the French AI startup, is targeting around $10 billion.
Anthropic has also faced scrutiny over its funding sources. In a memo to staff reported by Wired, CEO Dario Amodei acknowledged that the company is pursuing capital from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds despite earlier objections. “Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” he wrote. “This is a real downside and I’m not thrilled about it”.
Amodei argued that avoiding Gulf investors entirely could leave Anthropic outspent. “There is a truly giant amount of capital in the Middle East, easily $100B or more,” he told employees. “If we want to stay on the frontier, we gain a very large benefit from having access to this capital”.
The company has also drawn attention for a change in its data policies. Last week, Anthropic announced it would begin training its AI models on user chats and coding sessions unless users actively opt out. Consumers must make a decision by September 28, and for those who don’t, Anthropic will retain their data for up to five years. Business and government customers are excluded from the policy.
In its announcement, Anthropic framed the update as a way to improve model safety and accuracy. “By not opting out, users will help us improve model safety, making our systems for detecting harmful content more accurate and less likely to flag harmless conversations,” the company wrote.
Anthropic says the new $13 billion will be used to expand enterprise capacity, invest in safety research, and support international expansion. The company’s rapid rise has raised questions about the sustainability of AI valuations, but for now investors are piling in. “It’s not just [the jump from] $1bn to $5bn in revenue, it’s where it’s coming from,” Iconiq’s Matthew Jacobson said to the Financial Times.
Amodei has predicted that training the next generation of AI systems could cost up to $10 billion. “The cost of building cutting-edge AI models could reach as much as $10 billion by this year or next,” he said last year.
