According to sources, Anthropic has launched its latest funding round and is asking investors to submit offering proposals promptly. The round is expected to raise approximately $50 billion and is slated to close by mid-May. Anthropic’s target valuation is around $900 billion, but given surging investor demand for its shares, the final valuation is likely to exceed this figure.
Anthropic declined to comment.
Despite strong market demand, some early investors—particularly those who invested in 2024 or earlier—are opting out of this funding round, choosing to wait for Anthropic’s upcoming IPO later this year to realize their gains. Anthropic is currently conducting its final private funding round prior to going public to meet its substantial computing needs. The company plans to list on Nasdaq in the second half of 2026, with previous reports estimating the IPO could raise over $60 billion.
The parent company of this Claude model announced in April this year that its annualized revenue had exceeded $30 billion. According to insiders, the actual run rate has already surpassed the officially disclosed $30 billion, and a report by third-party research firm Semi Analysis in early May indicated that its annualized revenue (ARR) has risen to approximately $44 billion, an increase of $35 billion over the past 12 months. Starting from $9 billion at the end of 2025, revenue has grown nearly fivefold in less than five months.
Anthropic is currently the world's second-largest AI unicorn, trailing only OpenAI. However, behind its rapid growth, issues such as customer dependency, governance structure controversies, and competition with OpenAI in the IPO race may become key uncertainties on its path to going public.
The Growth Flywheel of Enterprise AI
Anthropic is one of the most commercially successful players in the large model industry. Its flagship product, the Claude Opus 4 series, has gained widespread recognition from enterprise customers for its capabilities in long-context processing, multimodal understanding, and security. The latest flagship model, Opus 4.7, released on April 16, once again set new industry benchmarks in programming, vision, and complex multi-step tasks. Its annualized revenue reached approximately $14 billion in February 2026, surpassed $30 billion in April following an official announcement, and reached about $44 billion by early May—growing at a pace far exceeding OpenAI’s during the same period.
From the revenue structure, enterprise customers account for over 80% of revenue, with eight of the top ten wealthiest companies as stable clients. The number of customers paying over $1 million annually has surpassed 1,000, doubling from previous figures. Among these, the annualized revenue from the Claude Code programming assistant alone has approached $2.5 billion, more than five times the $400 million recorded in mid-2025. Analysts estimate that approximately 4% of public GitHub commits globally have been generated or contributed to by Claude Code, with enterprise usage accounting for over half of Claude Code’s revenue.
This B2B advantage is directly tied to its “security-first” product positioning. Anthropic is one of the world’s leading large model providers focused on AI safety and alignment, with its models demonstrating significantly higher compliance and accuracy compared to similar products, leading to rapid adoption in highly regulated industries such as finance, law, and healthcare. Early 2026 enterprise spending data shows that Anthropic now holds 73% of the market share among companies purchasing AI tools for the first time, surpassing OpenAI in market share.
Its deep partnerships with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have also provided it with stable computing power supply and customer channels. In November 2025, Microsoft committed to investing up to $5 billion in Anthropic, while NVIDIA committed up to $10 billion, bringing the combined total to a maximum of $15 billion; in return, Anthropic pledged to procure up to $30 billion in computing power from Azure. On April 20, 2026, Amazon announced an additional $5 billion investment, with plans to increase it to a maximum of $25 billion, and Anthropic committed to purchasing over $100 billion in computing resources from AWS over the next decade, with large-scale deployment of Amazon’s custom Trainium chips. Google announced plans to invest up to $40 billion, securing 5 gigawatts of TPU computing power.
The valuation curve is equally remarkable. The Series F valuation reached $183 billion in September 2025, and the Series G valuation surged to $380 billion by February 2026, an increase of over 107%. The current target valuation aims for $900 billion; if the final terms are realized, the valuation will more than double from February’s level, matching or even surpassing its primary competitor, OpenAI, which recently completed a record-breaking $122 billion funding round in March 2026 at an $852 billion post-money valuation.
Three major risks
Based on information disclosed during the IPO preparation phase, Anthropic’s growth logic still has three significant concerns:
Concentration risk among clients remains structural.
Despite having over 300,000 enterprise customers, revenue remains highly concentrated among top clients. In addition to Amazon and Google, the two major shareholders, contributing over 20% of revenue, the business model is deeply tied to cloud platforms.
Anthropic has committed to purchasing up to $30 billion in Azure computing power from Microsoft, over $100 billion in AWS computing power from Amazon over the next decade, and secured up to $40 billion in investment and 5 gigawatts of TPU computing power from Google—these long-term agreements, while accompanied by substantial equity investments and reciprocal business benefits, could still impact their gross margins if the core cloud providers raise prices or experience supply fluctuations.
On the revenue side, if top customers reduce their purchases, shift to developing their own large models, or support other competitors, it will directly impact revenue stability.
Unique governance structure may raise investor concerns
Anthropic operates under a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) structure, with its core governance mechanism being the Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT), which holds special Class T shares with the authority to elect a majority of the board members. Even after going public, the company’s strategic decisions will prioritize the "long-term interests of humanity" over shareholder returns.
While this unique design grants it a policy advantage amid stricter AI regulation, it may also be viewed by public market investors as a "mission discount"—where the trust holds veto power over certain business decisions, potentially prioritizing ethical considerations over profits, and limiting investors' voting and profit rights.
Balancing the trust’s mission with shareholder interests in its尚未提交的S-1 filing will be the central challenge of the IPO roadshow.
The valuation premium is too high, creating immense pressure to deliver on performance.
At a target valuation of $900 billion, based on approximately $44 billion in annualized revenue, its PS ratio is around 20x, still significantly higher than the SaaS industry average of 8x to 12x. To justify the current valuation, Anthropic needs to achieve $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow by 2028, requiring it to maintain at least a 50% annual growth rate over the next three years while continuously improving gross margins.
It is encouraging that the Semi Analysis report shows Anthropic’s gross margin on its inference infrastructure has increased from approximately 38% a year ago to over 70%, indicating an improving unit economics model. However, the continued high costs of training and inference, combined with pricing pressures from competitors like OpenAI and Google Gemini, mean that realizing strong financial performance remains challenging.
Notably, Anthropic’s IPO process directly competes with OpenAI. After raising $122 billion in March 2026, OpenAI is valued at $852 billion and also plans to launch its IPO in the second half of 2026. If Anthropic goes public first, it could absorb significant accumulated investor demand for AI stocks, potentially dampening OpenAI’s market response—this competitive pressure has forced both companies to accelerate their IPO preparations.
Anthropic has currently engaged Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley as lead underwriters, with long-term legal partner Wilson Sonsini leading IPO compliance efforts, advancing at a slightly faster pace than OpenAI.
Anthropic's rapid growth has indeed aligned with the current momentum in the AI industry—Citibank raised its global AI market forecast for 2030 to over $4.2 trillion by the end of April 2026, increasing the enterprise AI market segment from $1.2 trillion to approximately $1.9 trillion.
However, for Anthropic to transition from a challenger to establishing a truly competitive market position against OpenAI, it must overcome multiple hurdles, including building an ecosystem, controlling costs, and expanding into the consumer market. Whether this IPO gains recognition from capital markets largely depends on whether investors are willing to pay a premium for its differentiated “safety-first” positioning and unique governance structure.
More importantly, even if successful in going public, can Anthropic maintain its technological edge and continue to expand its market share in an industry where large model technology evolves at a pace of less than 12 months? (This article was first published on the Titanium Media APP, author | Silicon Valley Tech News, editor | Zhang Hongjin)