In a single night, Anthropic completed a $65 billion Series H funding round, pushing its valuation to $965 billion and surpassing OpenAI to become the world's most valuable AI company.
Article author and source: AI New Era
At dawn on Friday, Beijing time, a muffled sound echoed through Silicon Valley.
In one night, seven names simultaneously appeared on the Global 500 Richest List!
Seven people entered the榜单 on the same day, all from the same company. This has never happened since the creation of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The company is called Anthropic. Each of these seven individuals holds less than 1% of the company, and each has a net worth of $8 billion.
Even more astonishing, seven individuals announced they would donate 80% of their wealth—combined, their total donations amount to nearly $45 billion!
Their CEO, Dario Amodei, wrote this in January this year: “What we should truly fear is wealth concentration severe enough to tear society apart.”
No one expected that this person who created wealth would be the one dismantling his own legend.
Unprecedented entry on the global billionaire list
On what seemed like an ordinary Thursday, Bloomberg’s data analysts stared at the data on their screens, thinking there was a system bug.
Seven names simultaneously debuted, breaking the all-time record of the Bloomberg Wealth Index.
They are the seven co-founders of Anthropic: Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, and Christopher Olah.
What elevated them collectively to legendary status was an astonishing H-round financing—a massive $65 billion investment led by top-tier venture capital firms including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital.
After this funding round, Anthropic’s post-money valuation skyrocketed to an astonishing $965 billion (nearly $1 trillion)!
This means that, despite each of the seven founders holding less than 1% of the company’s total shares, their individual wealth surged to approximately $8 billion each, based on precise calculations from PitchBook, Carta, and multiple funding rounds.
More historically significant: With a $965 billion valuation, Anthropic has finally surpassed OpenAI. Previously, in its March funding round, OpenAI was valued at $852 billion.
On this day, the throne of Silicon Valley officially changed hands.
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On Wall Street, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index is like the "Hall of Fame" of wealth.
Each day, this page tracks the wealth fluctuations of the world’s 500 richest individuals—typically requiring months or even years of capital accumulation to add a new name.
But these seven people broke the record overnight.
These seven founders were once the most core and top research staff at OpenAI.
In 2021, these seven individuals left together and founded Anthropic in a modest office in San Francisco.
These believers in "AI alignment" argue that if humans create an AI millions of times smarter than themselves but cannot ensure its values align with ours, it will mean the end of humanity.
Once mocked as Silicon Valley nerds, they now surpass OpenAI ($85.2 billion) with a $965 billion valuation, reshaping the global AI landscape.
Why is Anthropic worth $965 billion? The numbers speak for themselves.
Anthropic expects Q2 revenue to reach $10.9 billion, more than double that of the previous quarter.
According to data provided by SensorTower to Forbes: Throughout 2025, Claude accounted for only 1% of global AI app downloads each quarter, while ChatGPT held 67%. By Q2 2026, ChatGPT’s share dropped to 47%, while Claude surged to 14%.
Within a year, users voted with their feet, increasing from 1% to 14%.
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Today’s AI sector is itself an unprecedented "wealth printing machine" in human history.
Against this backdrop, Anthropic’s $65 billion funding round and the creation of seven billionaires worth $8 billion each seem entirely logical.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, the "shovel seller" providing the computing foundation for the entire AI era, has seen his personal wealth surge from $10.9 billion in October 2022 to over a staggering $177 billion, securing him the eighth position on the global billionaire list.
This month, Bloomberg confirmed another 19 new billionaires in the AI field, most of whom come from the latest wave of hot startups—such as the founders of Cerebras Systems, a recently publicized AI chip company, and Edwin Chen, founder of Surge Lab, whose net worth has reached $13 billion.
The combined wealth of these 19 individuals amounts to $59 billion.
Yet among all these wealth-creation stories, Anthropic remains the brightest supernova. Why? Because they don’t just tell great stories—they’re genuinely making massive profits.
Anthropic's current revenue is experiencing "exponential explosion": revenue for the second quarter of this year is projected to reach an astonishing $10.9 billion, more than doubling from the previous quarter!
According to Anthropic's official statement this month, its annual recurring revenue has now surpassed $47 billion.
Such a rate of growth has never been seen in the history of human commerce.
A vow to give away all one's wealth—“If we don’t donate, society will be torn apart by us.”
If the story ended here, it would simply be another traditional "Silicon Valley dream."
But Anthropic’s seven founders are clearly not ordinary Earthlings.
On the very day Bloomberg ranked them among the world's 500 richest people and media outlets widely reported that they each held $8 billion, Anthropic released a shocking message to Wall Street—
These seven co-founders have collectively signed an agreement pledging to donate 80% of their personal wealth.
At a valuation of $8 billion, each person retains $1.6 billion, while the remaining $6.4 billion is allocated entirely to charity, social welfare, and research into mitigating AI risks.
Together, these seven individuals have made a super donation totaling nearly $45 billion!
Are they out of their minds?
The answer may be found in an article published by CEO Dario Amodei in January this year.
In the text, he issues a stark warning: “The most alarming and concerning issue today is that AI-driven wealth concentration has reached a level capable of fracturing human society.”
This is no exaggeration. Today, global wealth is concentrating at lightning speed into the servers of a few companies and the pockets of these extremely few founders.
Dario is deeply concerned about the damage this trend is causing to democratic institutions and modern tax systems.
He pointed out that if AI companies drain profits from all industries, the middle class, whose income is spread throughout society, will lose their sources of income, government personal income tax revenues will collapse, and the social welfare system will become unsustainable.
Meanwhile, founders of AI giants like him will amass wealth rivaling that of nations and wield political influence surpassing that of sovereign states.
"Those at the forefront of the AI economic boom should willingly give up their wealth and power," Dario wrote in the article.
No one expected him to actually do it.
In the midst of greed and calculation in Silicon Valley, it truly seems like an outlier.
$80 trillion, a crossroads of the era
Currently, the $8 billion net worth of these seven founders is largely theoretical, based on equity valuations. But soon, these numbers will become real, tradable cash on public markets.
Anthropic and OpenAI, the two major rivals in the AI industry, both plan to pursue IPOs as early as this fall.
According to insiders, despite recently completing a record-breaking $65 billion private funding round, Anthropic has not slowed its pace toward an IPO and remains on track to enter the U.S. stock market as scheduled.
It is foreseeable that this will be the most wild, most widely watched, and potentially even market-index-redefining capital spectacle since the birth of the internet!
But for Anthropic, an IPO is the most severe test yet.
As a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), Anthropic’s charter legally requires the company to operate not solely for the maximization of shareholder profit, but also to consider the public good—such as AI safety.
Once listed, they will face the ruthless capitalists of Wall Street, who care only about quarterly earnings and profit margins.
Would Wall Street allow the CEO of a trillion-dollar company to devote most of their energy to "preventing AI from destroying humanity"?
Would shareholders agree if Claude’s updates slowed down, or if OpenAI surpassed it one day?
Can they uphold their original commitment—to donate 80% of their wealth and remain vigilant against social division—in that red ocean driven by greed?
No one knows the answer.
A day for the history books
Regardless of the outcome of the autumn IPO, Bloomberg’s record-breaking day is destined to go down in history.
On this magical Thursday, we saw seven young people who became billionaires overnight thanks to AI, who did not lose themselves in champagne and yachts, but instead took a clear stance to sound the alarm on excessive wealth concentration to all of humanity.
"Wealth is like seawater; the more you drink, the thirstier you become." Philosopher Schopenhauer once said this.
Yet, at the peak of the AI wave, these seven founders of Anthropic decided to return this sea to the entire world.
In this world being rapidly reshaped by AI, what we need most is to uphold human dignity and conscience amid the frenzy.
After all, without the warmth of humanity, even the most intelligent AI is just a collection of cold code.
No matter how immense the wealth, it is merely a long string of meaningless zeros in an account.