Anthropic is on a tear. The AI company, backed by Amazon and run by ex-OpenAI execs, confirmed on Tuesday that it raised $13 billion in funding, putting its valuation at $183 billion. That’s three times what it was worth in March, making this one of the fastest valuation surges Silicon Valley has seen so far in 2025. The funding round was led by Iconiq, Fidelity Management & Research, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Heavyweights like Altimeter, General Catalyst, and Coatue also threw money in. Anthropic’s finance chief, Krishna Rao, said the raise showed how tightly the company’s working with investors. “This financing demonstrates investors’ extraordinary confidence in our financial performance and the strength of their collaboration with us to continue fueling our unprecedented growth,” Krishna said. Claude’s launch lights a fire under growth Since Claude was announced in March 2023, Anthropic’s valuation has gone vertical. The company now says it has more than 300,000 business customers and a run-rate revenue of $5 billion as of August, up from just $1 billion at the start of the year. That’s a 5x jump in less than twelve months. Anthropic was built by people who used to work at OpenAI, including its CEO Dario Amodei. That matters, because the rivalry between the two companies is heating up fast. OpenAI has been making headlines ever since it launched ChatGPT in late 2022. It’s preparing a stock sale that would value it at $500 billion, as reported by CNBC. In March, OpenAI locked in a $40 billion raise at a $300 billion valuation, the biggest ever for a private tech firm. Just last month, it collected another $8.3 billion tied to that same round. Meanwhile, it rolled out GPT-5, which OpenAI calls faster and “a lot more useful” than earlier models. But not everyone’s happy. Some users complained that features from GPT-4o were missing. “We for sure underestimated how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them, even if GPT-5 performs better in most ways,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on X. Anthropic says the new funding will support AI safety research, help scale to meet demand from large enterprises, and push international expansion. Those are the three priorities. Anthropic changes its data policy and gives users a deadline Another big change is happening behind the scenes. Anthropic is making major changes to how it collects and stores user data, and people using Claude have until September 28 to decide if their conversations can be used to train the company’s AI models. That’s a full reversal from their old policy. Before this update, Claude users were told their data would be wiped after 30 days—unless it broke a rule or had to be kept longer due to legal reasons, in which case it might stick around for up to two years. That’s now history. If users don’t opt out, Anthropic will keep their conversations and coding sessions for five years and use that info to train future Claude models. The policy affects all individual users on Claude Free, Claude Pro, Claude Max, and Claude Code. Business customers using Claude Gov, Claude for Work, Claude for Education, or accessing via API won’t be affected. This is similar to how OpenAI protects its enterprise customers by not using their data for training either. Anthropic hasn’t given a full explanation beyond a blog post. But the company says the new policy is about “user choice.” If people don’t opt out, they’ll be helping improve the AI. The company says this will make Claude better at things like coding and reasoning, and also help reduce the number of times harmless messages are flagged as harmful. Still, the real reason is clear. Every AI company right now needs massive amounts of real-world data. Claude’s chats offer that. Training large models isn’t possible without millions of quality conversations. So this gives Anthropic what it needs to compete with OpenAI and Google; data at scale, straight from users. Get up to $30,050 in trading rewards when you join Bybit today
