Anthropic overtakes OpenAI as the most valuable AI startup

Anthropic raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round, valuing the AI lab at $965 billion post-money, in one of the largest private funding rounds in tech history.

Why it matters: With the round, Anthropic leapfrogs OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $730 billion.

Driving the news: The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.

• The company said the funding will support safety and interpretability research, expand compute capacity and scale Claude products and partnerships.
• Anthropic said its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month.

Zoom in: The round includes $15 billion of previously committed hyperscaler investments, including $5 billion from Amazon.

• Infrastructure partners, including Micron Technology, which just soared above a $1 trillion stock market valuation, also contributed.

What they're saying: "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," Anthropic chief financial officer Krishna Rao said in a release.