In a blog post on Thursday, Anthropic wrote that it “has raised $65 billion in Series H funding led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.” The most recent blog post along similar lines from OpenAI places its valuation at $852 billion. That means the top of the leaderboard has flipped. Among AI-first tech companies, Anthropic, “the Claude one,” is now technically more valuable than OpenAI, “the ChatGPT one.” There are, however, some mitigating factors to keep in mind about these valuations. First of all, as critics like Ed Zitron avidly and constantly point out (as well as more staid, mainstream critics like HSBC), AI as a core business is—to say the leas—unproven as a strategy for long-term profitability. Anthropic claims to have just turned an operating profit for one quarter, as the Wall Street Journal reported, but that story also notes that “it is unclear what accounting methods Anthropic has used to book revenue and costs,” and that, “The company might not remain profitable for the full year as it plans spending increases due to its vast computing needs.“
So it would be a stretch to call Anthropic a profitable company. Those aforementioned “vast computing needs” are no secret. It has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to companies like Amazon, Google, and Broadcom over the next decade, and it’s made a short term commitment of $1.5 billion per month to SpaceX.
