AI firm Anthropic raised $65 billion in private funding this week, the firm said, seeing its valuation rise to $965bn.

The increase means the Claude creator is now one of the most valuable start-ups in the world, overtaking top competitor and ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

Anthropic’s new funding round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks Capital and Sequoia Capital.

“This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens,” Krishna Rao, Anthropic chief financial officer, said in a statement.

Anthropic now outperforms its rivial OpenAI in market value and revenue, which climbed to $47bn as more people and organisations turn to Claude for coding and other tasks.

The firm also released its latest model, Claude Opus 4.8, which claims to have superior coding capabilities.

The release of Claude Mythos, an AI model boasting superior vulnerability detection capabilities, saw the firm reach new levels of fame in its continued competition with AI stalwart OpenAI, as governments and other AI organisations scrambled to get a look at the soon-to-be-released model.

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Anthropic’s spat with the US government over AI’s use in military operations – particularly in autonomous weapons and mass surveillience – saw a boost in users of Claude as the public construed the firm’s resistance as a moral stance – despite reports that the firm’s technology being used in US operations to bomb Iran.

The Claude firm is now expected to become publicly traded, along with OpenAI and Elon Musks’s SpaceX. Despite climbs in revenue and high valuations, all three companies are still losing more money than they are making.

OpenAI, Anthropic’s top competitor, is on its way to a $852bn valuation, the firm said in March, following its fundraising of $122bn. The firm recently overcame a major obstacle to a public