“Escalating AI Supremacy Race” Surge in VC Investment Demand for Anthropic, Closing In on OpenAI’s Valuation

Revenue Surges to $30 Billion
An Unprecedented Pace in U.S. Corporate History
Rivalry With OpenAI for Market Dominance Intensifies

Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers, appears poised to overtake OpenAI in terms of valuation. The company recently set a new benchmark for startup valuations after receiving proposals from investors that implied a valuation of more than $800 billion. With enterprise artificial intelligence increasingly cementing its role as core infrastructure across industries, competition between the two companies for market leadership is expected to intensify further.

Anthropic’s Valuation More Than Doubles in Just Two Months

According to Bloomberg on April 16, Anthropic recently received new fundraising proposals from multiple venture capital investors valuing the company at more than $800 billion. That proposed valuation stands at more than double the $350 billion to $380 billion pre-money valuation the company secured during its February fundraising round of $30 billion. It also comes close to the $850 billion valuation OpenAI received in its funding round on April 1. Experts said such large-scale investment proposals reflect exceptionally strong demand among investors seeking to secure stakes in Anthropic ahead of its initial public offering (IPO).

Demand for coding tools lies at the center of Anthropic’s valuation growth. One investor that has backed both companies said OpenAI would need to achieve a valuation of at least $1.2 trillion at listing in order to justify its latest funding round. By that benchmark, Anthropic’s current valuation of $380 billion is viewed by some as comparatively undervalued. That mood is also evident in the secondary market, where private shares are traded. Anthropic shares are effectively difficult to obtain, with demand far outstripping supply, while OpenAI shares are changing hands at a discount. That suggests a widening gap between formal valuation levels and actual investor demand.

Investors are said to have paid particular attention to the sharp rise in Anthropic’s revenue, driven especially by well-capitalized enterprise clients. Anthropic recently surpassed $30 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR). That marks more than a threefold jump from $9 billion at the end of last year. Its annualized revenue has also reached $14 billion, underscoring a blistering growth trajectory, with the company posting more than tenfold revenue growth annually over the past three years and transforming market expectations into conviction.

Claude Code as the Core Engine

That momentum stems from the rapid expansion in demand for the company’s Claude models among cash-rich enterprise customers. Claude, the flagship product, is broadening its market influence by supporting a wide range of enterprise functions, including coding, security, and automation. The recently unveiled next-generation model, Claude Mythos, is regarded as possessing agentic capabilities that allow it to perform tasks autonomously, along with powerful code-analysis functions. An official in the financial investment industry said, “Anthropic’s revenue growth is outpacing the trajectories seen during the dot-com bubble and the mobile revolution. Investors have been persuaded by the fact that companies are deploying Anthropic’s tools across operations ranging from coding to cybersecurity, generating tangible cash flow.”

Anthropic’s growth has also been underpinned by emphatic support from globally prominent investors. Its February round was led by GIC and Coatue, with participation from financial heavyweights such as BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, as well as big tech companies including Microsoft and Nvidia, underscoring confidence in Anthropic’s technological edge. Its customer base is equally robust. Eight of the Fortune 10 companies have already adopted Claude, while the number of high-spending clients paying more than $1 million annually has surpassed 500, solidifying the company’s leadership in the enterprise AI market.

According to data from Ramp, a U.S. corporate spend-management platform, Anthropic’s share of the enterprise AI market rose from 24.4% to 30.6% in March alone. By contrast, OpenAI’s share fell from roughly 46% to 35.2% over the same period. If that trend continues, Anthropic is expected to overtake OpenAI in the enterprise AI market within the next two to three months. Anthropic has already secured the top market share in three industries with high AI penetration rates—software, financial services and insurance, and professional services. On secondary-market trading platform Caplight, Anthropic’s transaction value has already reached $688 billion, up 75% from three months ago.

Coding-Agent Showdown: OpenAI Counters Anthropic’s Offensive

As growth accelerates, discussions over an IPO are also rapidly gaining momentum. The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic is in talks to target a stock market listing as early as October. Behind the company’s listing preparations lies the cost of building massive AI infrastructure. Anthropic plans to invest $50 billion in future U.S. data center construction and related projects. With liquidity in private capital markets tightening amid high interest rates and persistent inflation, analysts say entry into the public markets has become necessary to absorb mounting computing costs.

Against that backdrop, OpenAI and Anthropic are expanding their rivalry into the security domain as they vie for the upper hand. On April 7, Anthropic unveiled its next-generation AI model, Claude Mythos Preview. Although it is a general-purpose model, it has drawn attention for its extraordinary ability to identify security vulnerabilities and even write exploit code. According to Anthropic, Mythos Preview autonomously uncovered thousands of vulnerabilities buried for decades in major open-source software projects such as OpenBSD, FFmpeg, and FreeBSD during internal testing. Judging the risk of misuse to be substantial, Anthropic launched “Project Glasswing,” opting for restricted distribution to just 50 organizations—including key companies such as Microsoft, Nvidia, and Apple—instead of a public release.

Exactly one week later, on April 14, OpenAI responded by granting limited access to its security-specialized model, GPT-5.4-Cyber. Based on GPT-5.4, the model is distinguished by a lower refusal threshold for security-related tasks, enabling security professionals to conduct malware analysis and vulnerability research more seamlessly. It also includes binary reverse engineering capabilities, allowing analysis of compiled software without source code in order to examine malware and vulnerabilities. As the full-scale battle for leadership in the AI industry expands across coding and cybersecurity alike, competition between the two companies to secure an early lead is becoming ever more intense.