Computing power has become the true constraint on AI's future.
Anthropic's $65B funding round values the company at nearly $1 trillion, surpassing OpenAI's $852B valuation and making it the most valuable AI startup globally. The seven Anthropic cofounders, including brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei, each now hold an estimated $16.6 billion in personal wealth from their 1.7% stakes.
- Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion
- Seven cofounders each hold approximately 1.7% of the company, worth an estimated $16.6 billion per person
- Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion monthly for computing power on the Colossus supercomputer
- Company valuation has grown from $61.5 billion one year ago to nearly $1 trillion
- IPO expected by year's end
Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, becoming the world's most valuable AI startup and multiplying its founders' wealth to $16.6 billion each.
On Thursday, Anthropic announced a funding round that would reshape the hierarchy of artificial intelligence startups. The company had raised $65 billion at a valuation approaching one trillion dollars—a figure that vaulted it past OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, to claim the title of the world's most valuable AI startup. The announcement did more than settle a competitive score. It instantly multiplied the personal fortunes of the seven people who had founded the company, each seeing their net worth nearly double to $16.6 billion, according to Forbes' estimates.
The seven cofounders—brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown, and Jared Kaplan—each hold roughly 1.7 percent of the company. That stake places them in rarefied territory among the entrepreneurs who have grown wealthy on the rise of generative AI, though their fortunes still trail some of their rivals. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, declared during litigation against Elon Musk earlier in May that his stake in that company was worth nearly $30 billion. Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofoundant, valued his holding at around $7 billion. Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, owns no direct stake in his company, though his wealth from other investments reaches an estimated $3.5 billion. An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on the founders' holdings or their personal wealth.
The funding round illuminates the frenzy now gripping the AI sector. Investors continue pouring billions into the most promising startups, and Anthropic's valuation tells the story of that acceleration. Just four months earlier, the company had been valued at $380 billion. A year before that, it stood at $61.5 billion. The multiplication by more than fifteen in a single year reflects both the velocity of AI development and the scale of capital now chasing it.
Much of that capital will flow directly to infrastructure. The week before the funding announcement, SpaceX revealed in its IPO filing that Anthropic pays the company $1.25 billion per month to run its models on SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer. That single monthly bill—$15 billion annually—illustrates why even a $65 billion raise disappears quickly in the economics of frontier AI. The computational demands of training and deploying cutting-edge models have become staggering, and the companies pursuing them must raise capital at a pace that matches the hunger of their systems.
Anthropics's first half of 2026 had already been eventful before Thursday's announcement. In February, the company released Claude Opus 4.6, a coding model that roiled software stocks globally as investors worried that entire categories of software companies might become obsolete. That same week, Anthropic ran Super Bowl advertisements mocking OpenAI's decision to place ads within ChatGPT, and closed a $30 billion funding round at a $340 billion valuation. In March, the company clashed publicly with the Department of Defense over how the Pentagon might use its most advanced models. Anthropic deemed the technology potent enough to limit its initial release to just over forty technology companies—Apple, Microsoft, Amazon among them—to manage security risks. By Thursday, the company announced plans for a broader rollout in the coming weeks.
The Amodei brothers grew up in San Francisco's Mission District during the 1980s. Dario became absorbed in mathematics and physics; Daniela excelled as a classical flautist. Dario studied physics at Stanford and Princeton before joining Google Brain in 2015, then moved to OpenAI a year later, eventually rising to vice president of research. Daniela studied literature at UC Santa Cruz, worked in politics as part of former Pennsylvania congressman Matt Cartwright's team, spent five years at the payments giant Stripe, and then joined her brother at OpenAI as vice president of safety and policy. In 2021, the two left along with five other OpenAI researchers—Clark, a former journalist, and Olah, a Canadian machine learning researcher, among them—to found Anthropic with a particular commitment to the responsible deployment of AI models. Earlier in the week, the Vatican had invited Olah to attend Pope Leo's encyclical on artificial intelligence.
The windfall for Anthropic's founders is extraordinary, yet it remains entirely tied to a single company that has not yet gone public. Reports suggest an IPO could arrive by year's end. Their wealth, while staggering, still pales beside that of the founders of major technology companies. Elon Musk holds $839.2 billion, Larry Page $316.9 billion, Sergey Brin $292.2 billion, Mark Zuckerberg $217.9 billion, and Jensen Huang $185.1 billion. Those founders built their companies more than two decades ago and have ridden the AI wave to record fortunes. The Amodei brothers and their cofounders have compressed that timeline dramatically, but the comparison reminds us that even a $16.6 billion fortune, multiplied by seven, still represents a different order of magnitude from the wealth accumulated by those who got there first.
Notable Quotes
Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25 billion per month to run its models on SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer— SpaceX IPO filing, revealed May 2026
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does it matter that Anthropic is now worth more than OpenAI? Aren't they both just very expensive companies chasing the same thing?
The valuation is a signal about which direction the market thinks AI is heading. OpenAI had the first-mover advantage with ChatGPT, but Anthropic has convinced investors that its approach—particularly around safety and responsible deployment—is the one that will win. That's not just about money. It's about which vision of AI's future gets funded.
The founders are now worth $16.6 billion each. That's life-changing wealth. Does that change how they'll run the company?
It could. They're no longer fighting for survival. They can afford to take longer bets, to say no to lucrative deals that don't align with their values. But they're also not yet liquid—all that wealth is locked in a company that hasn't gone public. Until they can actually sell shares, it's theoretical.
You mentioned they pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month just for computing power. How is that sustainable?
It's not, in the long term, unless they find ways to make their models more efficient or charge customers enough to cover those costs. That's the real constraint on AI right now—not talent or ideas, but the sheer physics of computation. Every company at this level is racing to solve that problem.
The founders left OpenAI to start Anthropic. Was that a good decision?
By the numbers, yes—they're now worth more than they would have been if they'd stayed. But that's hindsight. They left because they believed OpenAI was moving in a direction they disagreed with. Whether that conviction was right depends on whether Anthropic's approach to AI safety actually matters in the long run.
What happens next?
An IPO, probably by the end of the year. That's when the real test begins—when their wealth becomes liquid and they have to answer to public shareholders instead of just themselves.