Anthropic hits a $380B valuation as it heightens competition with OpenAI
[February 13, 2026] By
MATT O'BRIEN
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic says it is now valued at $380
billion, cementing its position alongside rival OpenAI and Elon Musk’s
SpaceX in a trio of the world’s most valuable startups that investors
will be watching closely this year to see if they will become publicly
traded on Wall Street.
“These are the three biggest names that could go public this year,” said
Angelo Bochanis, an associate at Renaissance Capital, which researches
the potential for initial public offerings.
Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, said Thursday its valuation grew
after it raised $30 billion in its latest round of funding, led by
Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and the U.S.-based investment firm
Coatue, along with dozens of other major investors.
The funding also includes a portion of the $15 billion that Nvidia and
Microsoft said they would invest in Anthropic in November, part of a
deal that would eventually commit Anthropic to buying from Microsoft
some $30 billion in computing capacity it needs to build and run AI
systems like Claude. Anthropic has also been heavily backed by cloud
providers Amazon and Google.
Anthropic’s chief financial officer Krishna Rao says the company will
use the surge of investments to continue building “enterprise-grade
products” and AI models.
Renaissance Capital counts Anthropic as third among the most valuable
private firms. It's behind ChatGPT maker OpenAI, valued at $500 billion.
Both San Francisco-based AI companies trail rocket maker SpaceX, which
recently merged with Musk's AI startup xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok.
Anthropic isn't profitable but said Thursday it is on track for sales of
$14 billion over the next year, a rapid rise from “its first dollar in
revenue” that came less than three years ago. While OpenAI has dabbled
in a number of revenue models, including digital advertising, Anthropic
has tailored Claude products to be a workplace assistant on tasks such
as software engineering.
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Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual
meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23,
2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
 Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI
employees in 2021. Its co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has promised
a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology
called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms
aimed to build. Anthropic also this week announced a new $20 million
bipartisan organization to influence AI regulation in the United
States.
OpenAI first released ChatGPT in late 2022, revealing the huge
commercial potential of AI large language models that could help
write emails and computer code and answer questions. Anthropic
followed that with its first version of Claude in 2023.
Whichever company is first to do an initial public offering will
have “an opportunity to raise even more money,” Bochanis said. “It’s
an opportunity to be a big headline and get that sort of boost to
your public image.”
The risks are that they'll have to invite public inspection of their
business models as they continue to lose more money than they make.
“Private markets have been throwing dozens of billions of dollars at
these companies, even as valuations multiply again and again and
again,” Bochanis said. “With public markets, there’s going to be a
little more scrutiny. A single earnings report could tank a stock.”
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