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AI startups’ high-velocity valuations are shooting sky-high

The race to invest in AI startups is pushing funding to new heights. Anthropic is reportedly close to a fundraising round with a $170 billion valuation, just five months after a $61.5 billion valuation.

Jon Keegan, Hyunsoo Rim

7/30/25 2:40PM

Investors are pouring billions into AI startups at a feverish pace, and valuations are shooting sky-high.

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic is closing in on a $5 billion fundraising round, with an eye-popping valuation of $170 billion. That’s a 176% increase in five short months from its $61.5 billion valuation in March.

Anthropic’s sharp rise in value comes as its sales are increasing at a brisk pace. Bloomberg reports that the startup is pulling in $5 billion in annual recurring revenue, and that the company sees that reaching $9 billion by the end of the year.

OpenAI’s valuation roughly doubled over six months from $157 billion last October to $300 billion after raising $40 billion in a round led by SoftBank.

Middle East money

As AI companies look for deep-pocketed investors to help pay to train new models and build data centers, all eyes are pointing to sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East.

Wired reports that Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s cofounder and CEO, recently announced to staff that the company would pursue investments from Middle Eastern countries, despite earlier opposition.

During President Trump’s trip to the Middle East, a flurry of investments were announced, sending a clear signal that the taps were open.

Saudi Arabia’s Humain announced a deal with Nvidia to build 500 megawatts of AI data centers filled with the company’s GPUs, and OpenAI announced a partnership to build “Stargate UAE.” There were also reports that OpenAI has discussed raising money from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

And the rush to invest in AI isn’t just limited to the startups seeking to build foundational models. Companies deep in the AI ecosystem like Databricks and Scale AI are currently valued at $62 billion and $29 billion, respectively. Scale AI recently saw its CEO depart to run Meta’s “Superintelligence Lab”; it also secured a $14.3 billion investment from the company.

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5