Labs

Anthropic closes $30B-plus
round at $900B
valuation, leapfrogs OpenAI

Sequoia, Dragoneer, Altimeter and Greenoaks are each putting in roughly $2 billion as the Claude maker's second mega-round of 2026 vaults it past OpenAI's $852B mark — the same week its rival prepares a confidential IPO filing.

By Casey Vanderhoof Frontier labs correspondent · May 28, 2026

Anthropic is closing a financing round of more than $30 billion at a valuation north of $900 billion, Bloomberg reported on May 22, with the deal expected to wrap as soon as next week. That figure vaults the Claude maker past OpenAI, whose most recent March mark of $852 billion now sits a notch lower on the league table its rival has spent eighteen months climbing.

Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer, Altimeter and Greenoaks are each writing checks of roughly $2 billion as co-leads, with Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and General Catalyst also participating, per people familiar with the matter. Google and Amazon, whose earlier follow-on commitments of up to $30 billion and up to $20 billion respectively were struck at a $350 billion mark, retain their strategic positions. The economics of those earlier tickets have improved considerably.

The velocity is the story. Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion in March 2025, $183 billion that September, $380 billion in February’s Coatue- and GIC-led round (which CNBC called the second-largest private tech financing in history at the time), and now beyond $900 billion. Secondary markets had already pulled forward the next leg, with shares trading at an implied trillion-dollar valuation earlier this month.

That curve isn’t being drawn by vibes alone. Bloomberg reports the company expects $10.9 billion in revenue for Q2, more than double the prior period, on pace for its first profitable quarter, with annualized run-rate revenue set to surpass $50 billion by the end of next month. Recent deals include a nearly $45 billion arrangement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a $1.8 billion agreement with Akamai, alongside Google’s role as chip and cloud supplier.

The timing is the part worth lingering on. TechCrunch reported on April 30 that Anthropic gave investors 48 hours to submit allocations against a roughly $50 billion target, with sources describing the round as possibly the company’s final private raise. Fortune reported the same Friday, May 22, that OpenAI is preparing to file confidential IPO paperwork with the SEC, with a listing potentially as soon as September at a valuation that could reach $1 trillion.

So the two firms are converging on the same trillion-dollar gravity well from opposite directions: one through a last private mega-round, the other through the public markets. The Coatue-and-GIC-led February deal, eye-watering at the time, now reads as a stepping stone rather than a peak. Private capital has run out of ways to express conviction about frontier AI other than writing larger checks at shorter intervals. The next expression has to be a ticker symbol.

Sources