Anthropic is weighing investor offers that would value the Claude maker at more than $900 billion in a fresh primary funding round, according to reports from Bloomberg and CNBC published April 29, 2026. If completed, the deal would catapult Anthropic past OpenAI to become the world's most valuable AI startup by primary-market valuation.
The considerations are described as being at a very early stage, and no term sheet has been signed. Anthropic has yet to accept any offers, and the figure could shift as talks progress.
A quantum leap from February
The reported $900 billion target would more than double the $350 billion pre-money valuation Anthropic attached to its $30 billion fundraising in February 2026. It also tops the roughly $800 billion offers Anthropic was reportedly entertaining earlier in April, which the company shrugged off at the time.
The pace of escalation is striking: in less than three months, the implied valuation has reportedly nearly tripled, reflecting both surging demand for exposure to frontier AI labs and Anthropic's own growth trajectory. The company disclosed earlier this month that its business has reached $30 billion in annualized revenue, according to Bloomberg reporting on April 7.
Topping OpenAI
A close at $900 billion would mark a symbolic shift in the AI hierarchy. OpenAI has long been treated as the bellwether AI lab, and its own primary-round valuation cleared the $850 billion mark earlier this year. A $900 billion Anthropic round would put Claude's parent ahead of ChatGPT's parent for the first time in a primary financing — a meaningful distinction, since secondary-market chatter had already nudged Anthropic's implied valuation past $1 trillion in late April.
The rivalry is now playing out across multiple fronts. OpenAI has been pushing toward an IPO, expanding its enterprise sales force and locking in AWS, Oracle and Microsoft as long-term compute partners. Anthropic, meanwhile, has been quietly compounding revenue from Claude Code and enterprise API usage, while signing multi-gigawatt compute deals with Amazon, Google and Broadcom.
Backers and dynamics
Anthropic's biggest existing backers are Amazon and Google. Amazon has been the company's most aggressive financial supporter, layering on commitments that culminated in a $25 billion expansion announced earlier this month tied to Trainium capacity. Google committed up to $40 billion across cash and TPU compute in a deal disclosed on April 24, with $10 billion upfront and $30 billion contingent on milestones.
That dynamic — two cloud-and-model competitors simultaneously bankrolling the same independent lab — is unusual and creates obvious questions about how the new round would be sized and allocated. Reports indicate the offers are coming from financial investors rather than strategic ones, but the names of participating funds have not been disclosed.
Implications
For the broader market, the $900 billion talks reinforce a now-familiar pattern: AI valuations are decoupling from prior tech-cycle benchmarks, with the largest labs absorbing capital at a pace that traditional venture math struggles to explain. Anthropic's reported $30 billion revenue run rate would imply a price-to-sales multiple of roughly 30x at the proposed valuation — rich, but not unprecedented for high-growth AI infrastructure plays.
For Anthropic, the upside is obvious: more compute, more hiring runway, and additional cushion against the rising cost of frontier training. The risk is that the company is locking in expectations that its commercial trajectory must continue to validate. Investors will be watching to see whether Anthropic accepts any of the offers, what dilution Amazon and Google tolerate, and whether the round closes at $900 billion — or somewhere higher still.
