Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic said Thursday it had raised $65 billion in a new funding round that values the Claude maker at $965 billion, surpassing arch-rival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, which was valued at $852 billion in March.

The latest fundraising round confirms Anthropic's place as one of the most significant players in the AI industry. The startup, led by CEO Dario Amodei, has gained widespread attention for its advanced coding capabilities and state-of-the-art AI models.

Founded by former OpenAI employees, including Amodei, Anthropic has distinguished itself through a strong emphasis on AI safety, even as it accelerates product development to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving AI race.

Anthropic's rise came by doubling down on delivering generative AI to enterprise clients rather than general users, a strategy that differs from the path initially pursued by OpenAI.

"This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens," said Krishna Rao, Anthropic's chief financial officer.

The funding round was led by major Silicon Valley venture capital firms Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital. It also included $15 billion in previously committed investments from cloud giants, including $5 billion from Amazon.

Semiconductor companies Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, whose products are crucial to AI infrastructure, also joined the round as strategic partners.

Anthropic said Claude is now the first frontier AI model available across all three of the world's largest cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

The funding comes as Anthropic navigates a high-profile legal dispute with the Pentagon. The company has sued the Defense Department after it designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, a move the AI firm described as unconstitutional retaliation for refusing to grant the military unfettered access to its AI models.

Ahead of both Anthropic and OpenAI, Elon Musk's SpaceX, which absorbed his AI company xAI in February, could see shares begin trading as early as June 12, targeting a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion in what would be the largest IPO in history.

Claude Opus 4.8 launched

Anthropic also announced on Thursday that it is launching an upgraded Claude Opus 4.8 model, while preparing to release its powerful, market-moving Mythos model to all customers in the coming weeks.

Mythos is Anthropic's large language model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that have raised concerns among executives and world leaders over its impact. The company has restricted access to Mythos to selected security partners instead of releasing it to the public.

As part of Project Glasswing, major technology firms including Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are permitted to use Mythos for cybersecurity purposes.

The company said Opus 4.8 will be offered at the same price as its predecessor while delivering improvements across multiple benchmarks, particularly in honesty.

According to Anthropic, early testers found the model more likely to flag uncertainty in its work and less likely to make unsupported claims.

"A general problem with AI models is that they sometimes jump to conclusions, confidently claiming to have made progress in ​their work despite the ​evidence being thin," the Claude maker said.

(With input from agencies)