For the first time, corporate spending on Claude has edged past spending on ChatGPT, according to data that investors have been passing around this month. Ramp’s April AI Index, a spending tracker that samples payments across thousands of companies, put Anthropic’s share of enterprise AI spend at 34.4 percent against OpenAI’s 32.3 percent, the first time the lines crossed.
That data point helps explain the round that may follow. Anthropic is close to completing a new financing of more than $30 billion, possibly within the next week, according to reporting first published by Bloomberg and picked up by Readhub. If it closes on the terms being discussed, the round would value the maker of Claude at roughly $900 billion, putting it on par with, and by some counts ahead of, OpenAI, which was valued at about $852 billion in March.
The round
The financing is being co-led by Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Altimeter Capital and Greenoaks Capital Partners, each understood to be committing roughly $2 billion, according to Reuters. The remainder is expected to come from a small group of sovereign and pension funds, with the Saudi Public Investment Fund and Singapore’s GIC named by people familiar with the talks. Terms are still being finalized, and the structure could change before the wire clears.
The investor list reflects a deliberate strategy. Anthropic’s deal team has kept the cap table tight, limiting the round to a handful of anchors rather than opening a broad auction, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is optimizing for runway and signaling, not for a bidding war: a near-trillion-dollar private mark is the maximum credibility Anthropic can hold without being public.
The round follows one that closed barely three months ago. In February, Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion post-money valuation, a round led by Coatue and GIC with participation from Microsoft and Nvidia. A new round at roughly $900 billion would be a 2.4-times step in a single quarter, the kind of repricing that used to take a company a public listing to achieve.
What changed in three months
The jump rests on revenue, not on a new product announcement. Anthropic’s annualized revenue passed $30 billion by April, according to reports, and is expected to top $45 billion shortly; the company has given no single public milestone to justify the move. What investors saw instead was the Ramp data and a steady stream of enterprise wins for Claude across banks, insurers and software companies.
Enterprise adoption is the story.
The product line has kept pace with the money. Claude’s developer tools, including Claude Code for software engineering, have become fixtures in AI-heavy engineering teams, and the enterprise API has drawn banks, insurers and software vendors that prize control over flash. Analysts credit that focus, more than any single product release, with the enterprise share gain in Ramp’s data. Anthropic has positioned Claude as the AI for organizations that need reliability and control, with features like extended thinking and a security posture that has won over compliance-heavy buyers. OpenAI remains the household name, but in the data that measures actual corporate spending, the two are now effectively tied, with Claude holding a narrow edge.
The valuation also reflects a structural argument about the AI market. Capital is concentrating around the labs showing commercial traction, and the gap between the leaders and everyone else is widening. A $900 billion mark for Anthropic, eighteen months before the next big public AI listing, is the strongest available signal that investors believe the AI capital-expenditure cycle has not peaked.
The stakes for the AI race
The round resets the funding bar for everyone. Anthropic and OpenAI have now both raised $30 billion-plus rounds within months of each other, and each new mark raises the cost of staying in the frontier-model game: training clusters, data, talent and inference capacity all scale with ambition. For any lab below the top tier, the question of whether to raise at all has become a question of whether the round is worth funding.
The pressure falls most directly on OpenAI. The company closed a $120 billion round in March that valued it at $852 billion, and it is widely expected to pursue a public listing. A rival valued above it in private markets complicates that story, and it gives Anthropic’s investors a reference point that flatters their own position.
The money also has to go somewhere concrete. Anthropic trains its frontier models on clusters leased from Amazon and Google, its two largest strategic backers, and the proceeds of a $30 billion round will flow largely into compute, data and the engineering teams that turn them into models. Capital, in this market, is not stored; it is burned.
Bottom line
Anthropic’s near-$900 billion valuation, if the round closes, would crown the quiet rival: a company that spent years as the enterprise alternative to OpenAI would become the most valuable AI startup in the world on paper. The numbers behind it, an enterprise share edge and a revenue run rate crossing $30 billion, are real, which is what separates this round from a hype cycle. The question now is whether the capital keeps flowing at this pace, or whether the AI money race has priced in its own ceiling.
