San Francisco (United States) (AFP) - Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said Thursday it had raised $65 billion in a new funding round that values the Claude maker at $965 billion, putting it on the cusp of a trillion-dollar valuation ahead of an expected IPO.

The latest fundraising round confirms Anthropic’s place as one of the most significant players in AI, having made its name by doubling down on delivering generative AI to enterprise clients rather than general users, the path initially chosen by archrival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

“This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens,” said Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer.

Anthropic’s near-trillion-dollar valuation puts it ahead of OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion in March and is aiming to go public as early as this year.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which absorbed his AI company, xAI, in February, could see shares begin trading as early as June 12, targeting a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion in what would be the largest IPO in history.

Anthropic’s round was led by major Silicon Valley venture capitalists Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.

It also included $15 billion in previously committed investments from cloud giants, including $5 billion from Amazon.

Semiconductor firms Micron, Samsung and SK hynix also participated as strategic infrastructure partners.

The company said Claude is now the first frontier AI model available across all three of the world’s largest cloud platforms – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

The funding comes as Anthropic navigates a high-profile legal dispute with the Pentagon, having sued the Defense Department after it designated the company a supply chain risk – a move Anthropic called unconstitutional retaliation for its refusal to grant the military unfettered access to its AI models.