Anthropic is in early talks to raise at least $30 billion at a pre-money valuation above $900 billion, according to Bloomberg. The round, if it closes, would price Anthropic above OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation and arrive just three months after the company’s Series G at $380 billion in February. For founders watching how AI capital is being priced, the move marks the point at which the leading labs trade like sovereign assets rather than venture investments.
Bloomberg’s reporting cites people familiar with the negotiations. Terms have not been formally sheeted, and the company has not commented publicly. A separate Bloomberg piece earlier in May said Anthropic is also exploring an initial public offering as early as October 2026.
The valuation reflects revenue, not narrative. Annualized revenue has grown from roughly $9 billion at the start of 2026 to more than $44 billion by May, according to Bloomberg’s reporting and a follow-up analysis from Tech Funding News. That is an 80x year-over-year increase. Inside the revenue mix, Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding agent, accounts for $2.5 billion in annualized revenue on its own. Business subscriptions have quadrupled since January, and more than 1,000 enterprise customers are spending over $1 million each year.
At $44 billion ARR, a $900 billion valuation prices in a forward revenue multiple in the low 20s, which is steep but defensible by comparison to public software peers if growth holds. Holding 80 percent year-over-year growth for another four quarters is the entire bet. Anthropic has not disclosed gross margin on Claude Code or net retention on the enterprise tier, and Bloomberg’s reporting does not include those figures.
Two structural questions sit underneath the round. First, the compute commitment. Anthropic’s training runs depend on capacity contracted from AWS and Google Cloud, and a $30 billion primary round implies a roughly proportional uplift in compute spend over the next 24 months. Neither hyperscaler has publicly confirmed the capacity it will allocate. Second, the IPO timing. October 2026 is fast for a company that closed a private round at this scale six months earlier. The IPO path implies the company prefers price discovery in public markets over another year of private rounds at escalating valuations.
For operators, the practical signal is concentration. With OpenAI and Anthropic each priced near or above $850 billion, the next tier of frontier AI companies trades at a multiple discount that is unlikely to close. xAI’s most recent reported valuation was $200 billion, Mistral’s last round priced at roughly $14 billion, Cohere at $5.5 billion. Procurement teams negotiating enterprise contracts now face a structural pricing dynamic: the two leaders can hold list price because there is no commercial pressure beneath them.
Claude Code’s $2.5 billion ARR figure deserves its own attention. It signals that developer-tooling revenue is now a primary line at the frontier labs rather than a hedge against consumer revenue compression. Teams building competing coding agents (Cursor, Cognition’s Devin, xAI’s Grok Build) are now competing against a product line that funds Anthropic’s compute on its own.
If the round closes at $900 billion, OpenAI’s next pricing event will be the more interesting data point. Bloomberg’s reporting suggests OpenAI is considering its own primary round in the second half of 2026. Two AI companies priced above $850 billion privately is a market structure with no recent precedent. The Series G to next-round delta will tell operators whether the public market is being asked to absorb growth that private markets can no longer price.
Originally reported by Bloomberg on May 12, 2026.
