Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (Chance Yeh/Getty Images)

Anthropic in talks for funding at a valuation as high as $950 billion, which would make it bigger than OpenAI

An improbable, parabolic rise in valuation has rocketed Anthropic past the presumed leader, OpenAI.

5/13/26 12:06PM

OpenAI’s dominance in the generative-AI boom once seemed inevitable. As the first out of the gate with a usable generative-AI chatbot, ChatGPT gobbled up mindshare, securing its place as the de facto AI app that practically turned its name into a verb.

Everyone else was chasing OpenAI as it plowed ahead with plans to build massive data centers all over the world, and kept cranking out new models at an impressive pace. But hot on OpenAI’s tail was Anthropic, founded by a group of ex-OpenAI researchers, including its CEO, Dario Amodei.

Now, a once unthinkable threshold is on the verge of being crossed in the battle to dominate AI. The New York Times reports that Anthropic is in talks to raise between $30 billion and $50 billion with a staggering valuation of up to $950 billion. That amount — if finalized in the deal — would put Anthropic well ahead of OpenAI’s latest reported valuation of $825 billion.

Anthropic’s steady focus on productivity and coding skills has paid off. While OpenAI was distracted with side quests like web browsers and video apps like Sora, enterprise users fell in love with Claude Code. This is starting to show up in the data.

Today Ramp reports that for the first time, more business users are using Anthropic’s AI than OpenAI’s.

ANTHROPIC beats OpenAI in business adoption for the first time. per @tryramp data

Today's update of Ramp AI Index shows 34.4% of businesses using Anthropic versus 32.3% using OpenAI.

Adoption of Anthropic quadrupled over the last year, while OpenAI rose only 0.3%. pic.twitter.com/Hvdx4rQmYv
— Ara Kharazian (@arakharazian) May 13, 2026

The stumble comes at a perilous time for OpenAI, as its CEO, Sam Altman, took the stand again this week in a trial to decide a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk that could potentially fire Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, as well as undo the company’s recent restructuring into a for-profit company.

The speed at which Anthropic’s valuation has skyrocketed is incredible. Just over a year ago, Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion. If the valuation from today’s report holds, Anthropic’s value will have increased by more that 1,445% in a year.

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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