Anthropic Seals Term Sheet for $10bn Raise at $350bn Valuation

Anthropic has signed a term sheet for a $10 billion funding round that would value the artificial intelligence startup at about $350 billion, CNBC confirmed on Wednesday, underscoring the breakneck pace at which capital is still pouring into the most prominent developers of large language models.

The agreement marks one of the largest private capital raises ever for an artificial intelligence company, underlining both the intensity of investor appetite for AI and the escalating costs of competing at the frontier of the technology.

The round is being led by Coatue and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, according to a source familiar with the matter, with the discussions remaining confidential. Anthropic declined to comment, while the Wall Street Journal first reported the deal. If completed, the transaction would cement Anthropic’s position among the world’s most valuable private technology firms, narrowing the valuation gap with rivals such as OpenAI, whose valuation has reportedly climbed to around $500 billion.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research executives, including chief executive Dario Amodei, Anthropic has built its reputation around the Claude family of large language models. The company has consistently positioned itself as a safety-focused alternative in the AI race, arguing that reliability, controllability, and alignment will be decisive differentiators as AI systems become more deeply embedded in businesses, governments, and daily life.

The scale of the proposed funding reflects the brutal economics of cutting-edge AI development. Training state-of-the-art models now requires massive clusters of advanced GPUs, long-term access to cloud infrastructure, and the ability to absorb multibillion-dollar research and operating costs before meaningful profits emerge. Investors backing Anthropic are effectively wagering that only a small number of companies will have the capital, talent, and infrastructure to survive this phase — and that those survivors will command enormous strategic and commercial power.

Anthropic’s deepening ties with major technology players illustrate this dynamic. Amazon has already invested billions of dollars in the company and integrated Claude models into its cloud and consumer offerings, strengthening AWS’s position as a key platform for AI workloads. In November, Microsoft and Nvidia announced plans to invest up to $5 billion and up to $10 billion, respectively, moves that align Anthropic with both a dominant cloud provider and the world’s leading supplier of AI chips.

Those relationships also highlight a broader shift in the AI ecosystem, where model developers, cloud operators, and chipmakers are increasingly intertwined. Nvidia’s involvement signals confidence that Anthropic will be a major long-term customer for high-end GPUs, while Microsoft’s interest reflects its strategy of backing multiple AI players even as it remains closely tied to OpenAI.

Product momentum remains central to Anthropic’s pitch. Late last year, the company released Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Claude Opus 4.5, expanding its lineup to address a wide range of use cases, from fast, lightweight tasks to more complex reasoning, coding, and enterprise applications. The releases were aimed at keeping pace with rapid advances from competitors such as Google and OpenAI, which continue to roll out more capable and specialized models.

The funding talks also come at a moment when enterprises are moving from experimentation to deployment. Demand for AI tools that can be embedded into workflows, customer service, software development, and data analysis is accelerating, driving sustained usage and inference costs. That shift strengthens the investment case for leading model providers, but it also raises the stakes: companies that fall behind on performance or scale risk being locked out of lucrative long-term contracts.

At the same time, the eye-watering valuation underscores growing questions about concentration and power in the AI sector. With a handful of firms attracting the vast majority of capital, compute, and talent, policymakers and regulators are increasingly scrutinizing how AI markets are forming and who controls critical infrastructure. While Anthropic has emphasized safety and responsible development, its rising valuation places it firmly among the dominant players shaping the future of the technology.

For Coatue and GIC, the deal represents a bet that AI will continue to reshape the global economy and that Anthropic will emerge as one of the core platforms underpinning that transformation. For Anthropic, the $10 billion raise would provide a formidable war chest to expand computing capacity, attract top researchers, and accelerate partnerships, while signaling to customers and rivals alike that it intends to remain at the very top of the AI race.

Although the transaction has not yet closed and terms could still change, the signed term sheet alone sends a clear message: investor confidence in elite AI developers remains strong, valuations continue to surge, and the battle to define the next era of computing is far from over.