Anthropic, the maker of one of the trendiest tools in finance right now, Claude, said Thursday it raised $65 billion in Series H funding at a reported $965 billion post-money valuation, surpassing rival OpenAI and intensifying the race among AI companies to secure compute capacity and enterprise customers.
The funding round, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, comes as Claude continues expanding into accounting, forecasting, tax, audit and operational finance workflows inside large enterprises.
In a LinkedIn post Thursday, Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said the funding reflects “continued rapid growth in demand for Claude across enterprises and the people who use it for their everyday work.” Rao added the company plans to use the capital to expand compute infrastructure, scale products and continue investing in AI safety and interpretability research.
OpenAI and Anthropic’s AI arms race continues
The announcement follows recent public comments from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar about the growing infrastructure demands tied to AI adoption. During a podcast appearance earlier this month, Friar described OpenAI as facing a “vertical wall of demand” while discussing how aggressively companies are pursuing access to compute.
“There’s not a lot of compute in 2026,” Friar said while explaining how OpenAI is attempting to secure future infrastructure capacity years ahead of expected demand.
“My job as a good CFO is always to create optionality,” Friar added while discussing fundraising strategy, compute procurement and long-term capital planning.
Friar also described enterprise demand accelerating rapidly across industries. “Our sales team has just run ragged at the moment,” she said. “Everyone wants to talk to us about ‘what can I do to transform my business?’”
The banking industry has emerged as one of the largest areas of enterprise AI focus.
“I have not talked to a single CEO of a bank that does not have this as their top priority currently,” Friar added while discussing AI deployment conversations with financial institutions.
Rao has outlined Anthropic’s strategy in similarly expansive terms, but placed heavier emphasis on enterprise workflow integration and compute allocation efficiency. “The compute that we procure is the lifeblood of our business,” Rao said during a recent podcast appearance of his own discussing how Anthropic allocates infrastructure across research, internal operations and customer demand.
“If you buy too much compute, you go out of business. If you buy too little compute, you can’t serve your customers,” Rao added. He argued that enterprise spending continues to increase as newer Claude models unlock broader operational use cases.
“The returns to frontier intelligence are extremely high,” Rao said, particularly inside enterprise environments where organizations continue embedding AI deeper into workflows. “We started the year with about $9 billion of run-rate revenue and we ended the quarter with north of $30 billion of run-rate revenue,” he said.
One additional wrinkle to the funding round is that Altimeter Capital founder Brad Gerstner, who recently questioned CEO Sam Altman about OpenAI’s massive compute spending commitments in what became a viral clip, ultimately participated in Anthropic’s latest funding round through Altimeter.
During the exchange, Gerstner questioned how OpenAI could justify roughly $1.4 trillion in projected compute-related commitments against reported 2025 revenue figures. Altman responded bluntly: “Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” before arguing critics of OpenAI’s infrastructure spending would likely “get burned” betting against the company’s long-term revenue growth.
Gerstner later defended Altman on X, arguing investors were focusing too heavily on the exchange rather than OpenAI’s underlying growth, writing that AI represents “the biggest supercycle in the history of technology” and adding that he remained “a buyer” of OpenAI despite questions surrounding the company’s compute spending commitments.
Claude’s adoption expands deeper into finance
Over the past several weeks, some of the world’s largest accounting firms and financial institutions have expanded deployments tied to Claude across tax, reporting and finance operations. PwC recently said it planned to train and certify 30,000 U.S. professionals on Claude while expanding deployments tied to Office of the CFO workflows. KPMG also announced plans to integrate Claude into its Digital Gateway platform for tax and private equity clients.
Wall Street firms, including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, have discussed expanding Claude deployments tied to research, analysis and operational finance work.
Anthropic has also integrated Claude into its own finance organization. Rao said the company now uses Claude to help produce statutory financial statements across legal entities and has developed more than 70 finance-specific Claude “skills” tied to reporting and analysis processes.
“What used to take hours to produce … now comes down to 30 minutes,” Rao said while discussing internal reporting workflows.
Recent reports involving Microsoft and Uber also highlighted growing scrutiny around AI consumption costs tied to Claude Code deployments and token-based pricing structures as enterprise usage scales.
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