How Claude Is Helping Anthropic Overtake OpenAI in Enterprise AI and the $1 Trillion IPO Race

Anthropic exceeded OpenAI’s valuation after raising $65 billion from investors in May, bringing the value of the Claude artificial intelligence (“AI”) assistant and chatbot company to $965 billion, compared with OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation from March.

Anthropic, whose founders split from OpenAI to launch the company, has been seeing rapid success with its Claude AI models. In particular, the models have gained popularity among enterprise users, such as programmers, who favor Claude Code.

This popularity is reflected in its surging revenue, a factor that contributed to Anthropic’s much higher valuation. In its previous funding round in February, Anthropic was valued at $380 billion. In April, the company said its annualized revenue topped $30 billion, but updated that figure to $47 billion in its latest presentation as part of the fundraising.

Annualized revenue offers a picture of what the company’s revenue might look like over the course of a year at current rates. But it’s not a measure of the firm’s actual revenue.

However, Anthropic revealed that its actual second-quarter revenue is set to reach $10.9 billion. That’s more than double its first-quarter sales of $4.8 billion, a jaw-dropping rate of growth.

Perhaps the even bigger financial news is that management expects to turn an operating profit of $559 million in the second quarter. But executives cautioned that the company might not remain profitable throughout the year as they continue to invest heavily in growth.

That flip to profitability, even if short-lived, is a remarkable turn for a company that last year said it didn’t expect to become profitable on an annual basis until 2028. But the update suggests that the AI business can be profitable, though many key details remain unclear.

A path to profitability is critical for Anthropic, which filed its S-1 prospectus confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday for an initial public offering (“IPO”). AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI have been consuming vast amounts of cash, so news of profitability is welcome to bullish investors.

Anthropic’s Surging in Enterprise AI

A key driver for the recent surge in Anthropic’s valuation has been its growing relevance in enterprise applications. Its Claude Code has become popular, allowing programmers to use AI prompting to generate code. It can be as simple as identifying a high-level intent and asking the bot to develop and debug the code, in a process known as “vibe coding.”

Almost half (48%) of respondents in a March survey said their company was using Anthropic’s Claude models and planned to continue doing so, according to research firm Enterprise Technology Research. This figure rose from just 21% in the prior year.

That’s leaving rivals such as SpaceX’s (SPCX) Grok chatbot behind. A survey of 260,000 U.S. AI users in the second quarter of 2026 found that just 0.174% paid for Grok, a figure that was comparable with a year ago, according to AppMagic. In comparison, more than 6% of respondents paid for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Downloads of Grok have been falling to start the year as well.

SpaceX has been scrambling to gain relevance with enterprise users, having recently agreed to purchase the immensely popular AI coding start-up Cursor for $60 billion in the near future.

Enterprise users are especially coveted among software and AI companies. They have deep pockets to pay licensing and usage fees, and often lock these products into their workflows, creating high switching costs that “lock them in” to a company’s products for years. This setup means that enterprises are an attractive way to generate long-term revenue streams.

The value of enterprise customers has led AI companies to operate in a “land-grab” mode, locking them into their proprietary AI models. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been working to create joint ventures with private equity firms to help them land more enterprise clients.

Anthropic’s surging popularity helped scare investors in traditional enterprise software stocks earlier this year. Investors fear that the company’s AI products may displace these incumbents, dislodging them from positions many had considered hard to unseat.

Anthropic’s Still Furiously Raising Cash

AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are raising capital at a breakneck pace to build out their models and fund the costs of AI data centers that process their queries.

Every few months, OpenAI and Anthropic tap investors for more capital, and recent rounds have totaled tens of billions of dollars.

Here’s Anthropic’s recent fundraising:

• November 2024: Raised $4 billion at a $40 billion valuation

• March 2025: Raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion valuation

• September 2025: Raised $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation

• February 2026: Raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation

• May 2026:Raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation

Anthropic filed its IPO prospectus on Monday. While the company has not yet revealed its fundraising plans, an IPO would likely raise at least tens of billions of dollars more, given its cash burn and future cash needs. With investors willing to fund almost anything that’s AI-related, it’s still an optimal time to raise money with one of the hottest AI assets around.

Rival OpenAI’s $122 billion funding round in March was the largest capital raise ever. Even SpaceX, a relative newcomer to the AI race via its merger with xAI, is primed to raise an estimated $75 billion through its initial public offering (“IPO”) in June.

AI companies would love access to the cash while they can get it, so expect them to keep hitting up investors for more as long as they can. Anthropic has been opportunistic with its latest move, raising another round of capital and boosting its potential IPO valuation, too.

Regards,

James Royal, Ph.D.

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