Venture Capitalists Chase Anthropic for $800B+ Valuation Funding — But the AI Startup Isn’t Selling Yet

Venture capital firms are notoriously eager to snap up stakes in the world’s hottest, fastest-growing startups — but those breakout companies don’t always jump at the chance to offload more equity. That’s exactly the dynamic playing out with leading generative AI developer Anthropic, multiple sources familiar with the situation told Bloomberg.

Top VC firms have already approached the OpenAI competitor with preemptive funding offers that would value Anthropic at $800 billion or higher, a valuation that would nearly match, or even surpass, that of its larger rival. Back in February, OpenAI closed a record-breaking $110 billion funding round that pushed its post-money valuation to $852 billion. Only a few weeks before that deal, Anthropic itself announced a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation — a number that would have been considered an unheard-of industry milestone just a few years prior.

Per Bloomberg’s reporting, Anthropic has so far declined to engage with these latest VC overtures. That said, the company’s stance is not set in stone, and could shift down the line. Like all leading AI firms, Anthropic faces massive ongoing capital expenditures to scale its technology, even if it has not moved as aggressively to close large funding deals as OpenAI has in recent years.

For context, the maker of the Claude large language model has already locked in enormous spending commitments in recent months: it has set aside $50 billion to build out its own custom data center fleet, pledged $30 billion for cloud infrastructure from Microsoft, and spends billions of dollars annually on Amazon Web Services capacity. Sooner or later, Anthropic will likely need fresh capital to cover these costs — and the current terms on the table, which would value the company at more than double its previous valuation, are extremely favorable.

Even with Anthropic’s current disinterest, investors remain convinced backing the AI startup is worth the risk, driven by its explosive revenue growth. Per reports, Anthropic is on track to hit $30 billion in annualized revenue by the end of March, up from just $9 billion at the end of 2025. Demand for Anthropic equity is so strong that secondary markets have seen nearly insatiable appetite from investors looking to buy existing shares from early stakeholders. All it would take is a signal of interest from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for the company to close a funding round that would push its valuation past OpenAI’s.

Anthropic declined to comment when approached by Bloomberg, and did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this report.