Anthropic Is Raising at a $950 Billion Valuation — Why Claude’s Maker Could Overtake OpenAI in 2026

Anthropic is in early talks to raise between $30 billion and $50 billion at a valuation of up to $950 billion, according to a New York Times report picked up by Bloomberg on May 12, 2026. If the deal closes near the top of that range, the italicomaker of Claude/italico would leapfrog OpenAI’s $852 billion mark — set in its March 31, 2026 funding round — and become the most valuable private company in the world.

The timing is not a coincidence. On April 7, 2026, Anthropic’s annualized revenue hit $30 billion, passing OpenAI’s $25 billion run-rate for the first time. The company has tripled annualized revenue in four months, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025, and now counts eight of the Fortune 10 as paying customers. For comparison, Anthropic closed its Series G in February at $380 billion post-money — meaning the new round, if it prices at $950 billion, would represent a 2.5x mark-up in roughly three months.

How Anthropic caught — and passed — OpenAI on revenue

The headline number Wall Street wants to see is the gap between the two companies on annualized recurring revenue, or ARR. According to multiple sources tracking the AI race, Anthropic crossed $30 billion ARR in early April. OpenAI, by contrast, was last reported at roughly $25 billion. For most of the last two years, the order was reversed and the gap was much wider.

Three forces flipped it.

• Enterprise share: For the first time since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, more American businesses pay for Claude than for ChatGPT. Per the Menlo Ventures State of Generative AI in the Enterprise report, Anthropic commands 40% of enterprise LLM spend versus OpenAI’s 27%. In coding, the gap is even wider: Claude holds an estimated 54% market share against 21% for OpenAI.
• Claude Code: The terminal-based coding tool Anthropic launched in 2025 is now generating roughly $2.5 billion on its own, with business subscriptions quadrupling since January and enterprise use accounting for more than half of total Claude Code revenue. Anthropic has effectively built a second product category — AI for software engineers — that OpenAI has not matched at the same scale.
• Model cadence: Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 4.6 on February 17, 2026 and Opus 4.7 on April 16, 2026, with the latter described by the company as a “step-change improvement in agentic coding” over its predecessor. The release tempo has kept Claude at parity or ahead on coding benchmarks while OpenAI has cycled through internal model name changes and partnership renegotiations.

The combined effect is that Anthropic has gone from being seen as “the safer, smaller alternative” to the de facto enterprise default. Eight of the Fortune 10, 70% of the Fortune 100, more than 300,000 paying business customers, and over 500 companies spending more than $1 million a year on Claude tell that story in numbers.

Goldman, Blackstone and a $1.5 billion enterprise bet

On May 4, 2026, Anthropic announced a separate $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to deploy Claude across the hundreds of companies those firms own through their private equity portfolios. The vehicle is structured to embed Claude inside portfolio operations — software engineering, customer service, financial analysis — and to share in the productivity upside.

For investors, the joint venture matters for two reasons. First, it locks in distribution. Blackstone alone has more than 230 portfolio companies across private equity and tactical opportunities; a single GP-level decision can cascade into hundreds of enterprise seat deployments. Second, it gives Anthropic political and financial cover at exactly the moment regulators are starting to scrutinize AI deployment. Goldman Sachs sitting on the cap table of a $950 billion private company changes what a future IPO road show looks like.

And an IPO is now openly on the calendar. Reuters and Bloomberg both report that Anthropic is targeting a public listing as early as October 2026 — a window that would let the company avoid both the early-2027 election aftermath and the late-2026 Fed transition under new Chair Kevin Warsh.

What this means for Big Tech stocks

For Microsoft, the news has two layers. The good news: Microsoft’s exclusive partnership with OpenAI quietly ended this spring, freeing OpenAI to sell on AWS and Google Cloud but also freeing Microsoft to deepen its commercial ties with Anthropic, which already runs production workloads on Azure. The bad news: Microsoft’s narrative as “the one AI hyperscaler” loses force when its primary partner is no longer the runaway market leader on enterprise.

For Google, the picture is mixed. Anthropic remains a major customer of Google Cloud’s TPU infrastructure, which is a structural tailwind for Alphabet’s cloud unit. But Google also competes head-to-head with Claude in the consumer chatbot space through Gemini, and Anthropic’s enterprise momentum makes the consumer race look like the secondary front.

For Nvidia, the angle is simpler: more capital chasing AI training means more demand for GPUs. A $50 billion check that ends up roughly half in compute, by industry rules of thumb, is the kind of order book that keeps the data center segment growing even if hyperscaler capex begins to plateau. The structural setup explains why Morgan Stanley’s list of AI stocks to own still places Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet in the top tier.

The risks that could still derail the print

Three caveats are worth marking.

The first is that “in talks” deals at private-market valuations sometimes shrink between leak and close. Reuters had earlier put the round at “above $900 billion” and Bloomberg at “around $900 billion” before NYT’s $950 billion ceiling; a final print could land closer to $700-800 billion if the AI infrastructure narrative wobbles before mid-summer.

The second is regulatory. The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have both opened broad inquiries into AI partnerships between hyperscalers (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) and AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic). A material remedy — forced divestiture, mandated open access — would compress private-market multiples industry-wide.

The third is the macro tape. With the 10-year Treasury at 4.59% and the Fed on hold, private growth-stage valuations are pricing in a rate-cut cycle that has yet to materialize. If May CPI prints hot, the entire AI funding stack resets lower.

For now, though, Anthropic has the tape, the customers, and Goldman in the syndicate. The skeptics’ line that there is no real market for AI yet — most prominently associated with OpenAI’s Sam Altman in his own marketing — has aged poorly. Dario Amodei’s team in San Francisco found the market. They are about to be paid for it.

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