The company is entertaining offers for approximately $50 billion at a valuation of $850–$900 billion, with a board decision expected in May and a potential IPO as early as October 2026.

Anthropic has begun weighing a fresh funding round at a valuation of more than $900 billion, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter. The considerations are at an early stage and no offers have been accepted, the people said. The company declined to comment.

A board decision on whether to proceed is expected in May. If the round closes at those terms, Anthropic would surpass OpenAI, valued at $852 billion in its record-breaking $122 billion round completed in March, as the most valuable private AI company in the world.

The round would also more than double Anthropic’s current valuation. The company raised $30 billion in February 2026 at a $380 billion valuation, a deal already described as the second-largest private funding round in history.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

The speed of the valuation escalation is extraordinary even by current AI standards: from $61.5 billion in March 2025, to $183 billion by its Series F in September, to $380 billion in February, to, if the current discussions proceed, more than $900 billion in May.

What is driving the demand?

Two things have converged to create the current investor urgency. The first is Anthropic’s revenue trajectory. The company’s annualised revenue run rate reached approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025, $30 billion by the end of March 2026, and the company said earlier this month that it has crossed $30 billion in annualised revenue.

No company in American technology history has grown at that rate. Enterprise customers now represent approximately 80% of Anthropic’s revenue, with more than 1,000 businesses spending over $1 million annually on its services.

The second is Mythos, Anthropic’s advanced cybersecurity model unveiled on 7 April. Mythos has sparked high-profile meetings between Trump administration officials, technology CEOs, and bank executives, and, crucially for the fundraising, the company needs substantially more compute to run it at the scale being demanded.

Today, the White House has simultaneously told Anthropic it opposes expanding Mythos access to additional users, partly because Anthropic lacks enough computing power to serve more users without degrading the government’s own access.

Anthropic has recently secured major compute commitments from both Amazon, which agreed to invest up to $25 billion and provide 5 gigawatts of compute capacity, and Google, which committed up to $40 billion and an additional 5 gigawatts.

But running a model of Mythos’ complexity at scale requires more than existing commitments can deliver, and a primary funding round gives Anthropic balance-sheet flexibility to directly purchase additional compute beyond what its strategic partners have allocated.

IPO as the horizon

The timing of the discussions is shaped by Anthropic’s reported IPO plans. Bloomberg reports that a public listing could come as early as October 2026. TechCrunch’s sources describe the potential $50 billion round as possibly the company’s final private fundraise before going public.

Anthropic is reported to be in early discussions with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley about the offering, with estimates of a $60 billion raise.

A $900 billion pre-IPO valuation would set the stage for one of the largest public offerings in technology history, and would also intensify pressure on OpenAI, which is also expected to IPO in 2026 at a valuation that has come under scrutiny from its own investors in recent weeks.

Anthropic’s shares were already trading at an implied $1 trillion valuation on secondary markets earlier this month, driven by a combination of revenue acceleration and a supply-demand imbalance in available shares.

A primary round at $900 billion would represent a modest discount to that secondary pricing, unusual in private markets, where primary rounds typically command a premium.

Whether Anthropic can sustain the revenue trajectory that justifies either figure is the question both the board’s May decision and, eventually, public markets will have to answer.