Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup, is poised to close a funding round exceeding $20 billion in the coming days, a move that would value the company at $350 billion, according to sources familiar with the matter. The potential investment nearly doubles Anthropic’s valuation from just five months ago, when it secured $13 billion in funding, and reflects the intense investor interest in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
The surge in valuation is underpinned by Anthropic’s impressive revenue run rate, which surpassed $9 billion last summer. This growth coincides with the release of ‘s Claude Opus 4.6, the latest iteration of its flagship AI model. Designed for enterprise applications and complex knowledge work, Claude Opus 4.6 aims to streamline the entire workflow – from information retrieval and analysis to the generation of finished documents, spreadsheets, and presentations – with a focus on minimizing revisions and delivering production-ready outputs on the first attempt.
However, the introduction of Claude Opus 4.6 wasn’t without broader market repercussions. The launch triggered a multi-billion dollar selloff across the software and financial services industries, highlighting the growing anxieties surrounding the disruptive potential of AI and its impact on established tech giants. This selloff occurred against a backdrop of significant planned spending on AI infrastructure by major players like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet, collectively earmarked to invest around $650 billion this year.
The market reaction underscores a growing uncertainty about the future of traditional software companies in the face of increasingly capable AI models. Amazon, for example, saw its stock price plunge 12% this week, shedding over $310 billion in market value after announcing plans to spend $200 billion in the coming year, primarily on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division. Microsoft and Meta have announced similar substantial investments in AI, contributing to a collective loss of nearly $1 trillion in market value for the four companies over the past five days.
Despite the overall downturn in tech stocks, certain sectors experienced gains. Industrial stocks, such as Caterpillar, and energy firms benefited from expectations of increased demand for data centers to support the expanding AI infrastructure. Chipmakers, particularly Nvidia, also saw significant gains, with Nvidia’s stock rising nearly 8% and its market capitalization exceeding $4.5 trillion. This divergence highlights a shift in investor focus towards the companies positioned to benefit directly from the buildout of AI infrastructure.
The broader market volatility comes as companies grapple with the implications of AI for productivity, labor costs, and future growth. Oracle recently announced plans to raise between $45 billion and $50 billion to fund its own AI infrastructure buildout, a move that sent its shares down in premarket trading. This scramble for capital underscores the immense financial commitment required to compete in the emerging AI landscape.
Anthropic’s competitor, OpenAI, is also aggressively pursuing enterprise opportunities. Last week, OpenAI launched a platform, Frontier, designed to help businesses build, deploy, and manage AI agents. Complementing this platform, OpenAI is offering the services of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) to work directly with enterprise teams, fostering best practices for AI agent development and implementation.
These developments are occurring at a critical juncture for enterprise software. After years of being locked into inflexible and monolithic solutions, businesses are increasingly demanding more from their B2B vendors, recognizing the potential for AI to unlock new levels of efficiency and innovation. This is particularly relevant for B2B payments, which are often repetitive, data-rich, and historically manual – an ideal environment for AI to flourish, but also one where workflow failures and downtime can be particularly costly.
The challenge for corporate leaders, as noted by industry observers, lies in discerning between AI applications that genuinely improve decision-making and resilience and those that simply accelerate existing inefficiencies or prove too fragile for critical enterprise systems. The current investment frenzy and market volatility suggest that this discernment will be crucial in navigating the evolving AI landscape and realizing its full potential.
