Anthropic has fielded multiple offers from VCs valuing the startup behind Claude at as much as $800 billion in recent weeks, more than double its current valuation, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Buzzy startups frequently field preemptive offers from investors only to rebuff them.
Still, the valuations VCs are floating indicate the feverish demand that has overtaken Silicon Valley for a stake in Anthropic as the company prepares for a possible IPO later this year.
A spokesperson for Anthropic declined to comment.
Anthropic closed a funding round in February led by GIC and Coatue that valued the company at $380 billion. That is less than half the $852 billion valuation OpenAI achieved in the funding round it closed last month.
Anthropic is valued at $688 billion on Caplight, a secondary exchange where investors can trade shares of privately held companies. That is up 75% in three months.
Investors and founders have been wowed by Anthropic’s torrid growth and momentum around AI-powered coding assistant Claude code.
“They’re crushing it,” Jared Quincy Davis, founder and CEO of Mithril, an AI cloud platform, said about Anthropic last week at HumanX, an AI conference.
Anthropic’s run-rate revenue, the revenue a company expects to collect over a year, has soared to $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of last year, the company announced last week. It also added that over 1,000 business customers are spending more than $1 million a year, a figure that has doubled in less than two months.
Last week, Anthropic announced its latest model, Mythos, which it said is so powerful it cannot yet be unleashed upon the general public because of the risk of cyber attacks.
“The Mythos model is a huge deal, Tomasz Tunguz, founder and general partner of Theory Ventures, said last week at HumanX. “There’s a tremendous amount of excitement.”
