Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude and the Mythos cybersecurity model, is in talks to raise between $30 billion and $50 billion in new funding at a valuation of up to $950 billion, according to reports from The New York Times and Bloomberg published Monday. If the deal closes, it would make Anthropic more valuable than OpenAI for the first time in the AI industry's brief history.

OpenAI's most recent funding round, completed in March 2026, valued the ChatGPT maker at $852 billion. A $950 billion valuation for Anthropic would represent a nearly 2.5x increase from its $380 billion Series G in February, and a more than fivefold jump from the $183 billion it was worth just eight months ago.

The Numbers Behind the Number

The valuation surge is not just hype. Anthropic's annualized revenue has grown from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $44 billion by May 2026. CEO Dario Amodei told attendees at the company's developer conference in San Francisco that Anthropic could grow 80-fold this year, though he added, "I hope the 80-fold growth doesn't continue, because that's just crazy and too hard to manage."

Enterprise clients generate over 80% of revenue. Eight of the Fortune 10 are stable Anthropic customers, and more than 1,000 enterprise customers spend over $1 million per year on the company's services. Gross margins have improved from 38% a year ago to over 70%, quieting concerns that the economics of frontier AI models would never work at scale.

Why OpenAI Should Be Nervous

The contrast in business models is becoming the defining narrative of the AI industry. OpenAI relies heavily on ChatGPT as a mass-market consumer product, generating roughly $24 billion in annualized revenue from approximately $2 billion per month. Anthropic has taken the opposite path, building its business almost entirely on enterprise API usage and developer tools like Claude Code. The enterprise-first approach is proving more lucrative and, critically, more predictable.

Anthropic is also the only frontier AI company with models available across all three major cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Google has committed up to $40 billion in investment, Amazon up to $25 billion, and the SpaceX Colossus 1 partnership provides over 300 megawatts of compute capacity.

The IPO Clock Is Ticking

According to TradingKey and the Financial Times, Anthropic has held preliminary discussions with financial institutions about an IPO that could happen as early as October 2026, with a potential raise exceeding $60 billion. Public market investors reportedly favor Anthropic's enterprise model, viewing its path to profitability as clearer than OpenAI's consumer-heavy approach.

The current funding round would serve as the final pre-IPO capital raise, primarily to secure additional computing infrastructure. Term sheets have not been signed, but sources told Bloomberg that negotiations are moving quickly and could finalize by the end of May.

If Anthropic does cross the $950 billion threshold, it will mark a historic inversion in the AI industry. For three years, the story of frontier AI has been written in OpenAI's image. The next chapter may belong to the company that Dario and Daniela Amodei built after leaving OpenAI in 2021, taking their safety-first ethos and a very different theory of how to build a lasting AI business.

Originally reported by The New York Times and Bloomberg. Additional data from TradingKey, Financial Times, and Trending Topics EU.