OpenAI’s AI Rival Wants to Raise $20 Billion: Why Investors Are Jumping into Anthropic

Anthropic is about to close one of the largest funding rounds ever in the AI ​​sector. The American company, an important competitor of OpenAI, is working on a capital injection of more than twenty billion dollars. The deal could close as early as next week.

The valuation amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars and that underlines how fierce the battle for dominance in artificial intelligence has become.

More than doubling the valuation

Anthropic initially went to market with a plan to raise $10 billion. Due to the enormous interest from investors, that goal is now far outdated. The company is now heading for a financing round of more than double that, with a valuation of approximately $350 billion. That is almost twice as much as in the previous capital round, which was completed less than six months ago.

According to sources, several major investment funds are ready to invest more than a billion dollars each. Large tech companies also want to participate and together they would contribute up to fifteen billion dollars. The deal has not been finalized yet. The precise timing and conditions may therefore still change.

The fact that Anthropic is once again raising billions in such a short time shows how much confidence there is in the company’s growth. Turnover is said to have already risen to billions per year last year. Investors therefore seem to be less and less concerned about the sky-high valuations in the AI ​​sector, even though there are increasing concerns about costs and competition.

New AI models are causing unrest in markets

The interest does not come out of the blue. Anthropic recently had a standout week with the introduction of a new AI model aimed at automating business processes. That announcement led to significant price drops in software and financial companies. Investors fear that existing revenue models will come under pressure.

Anthropic’s so-called coding agents in particular attract a lot of attention. These systems can write and modify software with minimal human input. More and more companies and developers are already actively using this technology. Investors see this as the beginning of a new phase in which AI independently carries out tasks on the work floor.

Race with OpenAI and a look at an IPO

The mega deal at Anthropic comes at a striking time. At the same time, competitor OpenAI is talking to investors about a new financing round that could amount to a hundred billion dollars. Both companies now appear to be carefully preparing for an IPO later this year.

At the same time, tension is growing around the costs of this AI race. The bills for data centers, advanced chips and scarce AI talent are mounting quickly. Regulators and investors are also increasingly looking critically at investments from suppliers who themselves invest money in AI companies. This raises questions about how independent and healthy those cash flows are.

For the time being, this hardly seems to slow investors down. The interest in AI remains as high as ever. In the coming weeks it will become clear whether Anthropic will finally complete the financing round and whether the already high valuations in the sector will be stretched even further.