Anthropic Closes $30B Funding Round
AI safety and research company Anthropic has closed a monumental $30 billion funding round, reaching a valuation of $380 billion. The deal, led by global investors including GIC and Coatue, is the second-largest venture deal in history and will fund research into scalable models and commercial applications in robotics and defense. The raise prompted a public rebuke from Elon Musk, who called the company's approach "misanthropic and evil," highlighting the intense competition in the AI sector.
- The company was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who were formerly OpenAI's VP of Research and VP of Safety and Policy, respectively. They left OpenAI in late 2020 due to disagreements over the company's direction following its partnership with Microsoft. - Elon Musk's criticism stems from allegations of demographic bias in Anthropic's models, stating on X, "Your AI hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men." He also noted that Anthropic had cut off his company, xAI, from accessing its models. - This funding round is the second-largest single venture investment in history, surpassed only by OpenAI's $40 billion financing round led by SoftBank in March 2025. - Lead investor GIC is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore, and both GIC and Coatue also participated in Anthropic's previous $13 billion Series F round. Other notable investors in the current round include Sequoia Capital and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, both of whom have also backed OpenAI. - Applications of large language models in defense are being explored for improved decision-making and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISTAR) operations. In robotics, the technology is being used to translate high-level human instructions into specific, executable tasks for robots. - Anthropic reports an annual revenue run rate of $14 billion, having grown more than tenfold in each of the last three years. The number of customers spending over $1 million annually now exceeds 500, and includes eight of the ten largest Fortune 100 companies. - A key driver of the company's growth is its AI coding assistant, Claude Code, which launched in May 2025. The tool now accounts for an annual revenue run rate of over $2.5 billion, and a recent analysis estimated that it writes 4% of all public commits on GitHub. - Prior to this round, Anthropic had already raised a total of $7.3 billion, including a $2 billion investment from Google in 2023 and $8 billion from Amazon.
