Anthropic has closed a $65 billion Series H funding round, achieving a valuation of $965 billion (approximately 1,444 trillion won) and surpassing OpenAI to become the world's most valuable AI startup.
According to the IT industry on May 29, this funding round, led by Altimeter Capital with participation from Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, is considered one of the largest private funding rounds in tech startup history. OpenAI's recent valuation stands at $730 billion, putting Anthropic approximately 32% ahead. Industry experts believe this round may be Anthropic's last pre-IPO funding before going public.
On the same day, Anthropic also unveiled its latest flagship model, Claude 4.8. This rapid upgrade, just 41 days after the release of Claude 4.7, features improved benchmark performance in areas such as agentic coding, financial analysis, and reasoning, while maintaining the same pricing. The fast mode (2.5 times speed) is now three times cheaper than the previous model, and the Claude code includes a new 'dynamic workflow' feature that allows multiple sub-agents to run in parallel.
ByteDance Considers Up to $70 Billion Investment in AI Infrastructure
Bloomberg reported that ByteDance is considering up to $70 billion in capital expenditures this year for data center and AI infrastructure development. This amount is 2.8 times last year's spending of approximately $25 billion. ByteDance plans to fund a significant portion of this investment with an estimated net profit of around $50 billion in 2025. While this figure does not match Amazon's annual capital expenditures of over $130 billion or Alphabet's $185 billion, it is substantial compared to Chinese competitors like Tencent ($12 billion) and Alibaba ($19 billion), indicating ByteDance's ambition to challenge for global AI dominance. The monthly active users of its AI assistant, Douyin, reached 345 million as of March this year.
OpenAI Launches AI Consulting Subsidiary Valued at $4 Billion
On May 11, OpenAI established an independent subsidiary, OpenAI Deployment Company (DeployCo), after raising over $4 billion from 19 companies, including TPG, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Bain Capital, and Capgemini. The subsidiary adopts a Palantir-style model by deploying field deployment engineers (FDEs) directly within companies to build and operate AI systems. This move is seen as a response to OpenAI's market share in the corporate API sector, which is projected to drop from about 50% in 2023 to around 25% by mid-2025. Three of the Big Four accounting firms—Deloitte, PwC, and KPMG—have integrated Anthropic's Claude into their enterprise platforms, strengthening their supply chains with Anthropic.
* This article has been translated by AI.
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.