Anthropic is fielding offers at a $900B valuation. The round closes in two weeks and tops OpenAI.

Anthropic is weighing preemptive bids for a new round of $40 billion to $50 billion at a valuation between $850 billion and $900 billion, according to multiple sources cited by Bloomberg, CNBC, and TechCrunch. A board meeting in May is expected to lock in the price and the lead investors. The company itself declined to comment.

If the round closes at the top of that band, Anthropic would price above OpenAI’s $852 billion February raise and become the most valuable private AI company. The math is the part that’s making this credible. Anthropic’s run rate went from “approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025” to over $30 billion as of March, the company confirmed earlier this month. That’s a 3.3x jump in a single quarter, driven mostly by enterprise contracts, and it explains why investors are pre-committing capital before the company has formally opened a round.

What’s actually new

The framing of “$900B valuation” has been in the air since Bloomberg’s April 29 report. The new piece is the timeline. Sources cited by TechCrunch say the close could happen within two weeks, with investors given a 48-hour allocation deadline once Anthropic decides which preemptive bids to accept. That kind of compressed window only happens when the company has more demand than it needs and wants to set a hard price floor instead of running a roadshow.

One detail in the TechCrunch reporting that didn’t make the other write-ups: an institutional investor was reportedly prepared to commit $5 billion but couldn’t get a meeting with CFO Krishna Rao. That single line is the clearest signal of the demand environment. A $5 billion check is a notable allocation in any private market, and if Anthropic’s CFO is screening calls, the round is oversubscribed before it’s officially announced.

How this compares to Anthropic’s last round

The February 2026 round priced Anthropic at $380 billion with a $30 billion raise. The proposed May round would more than double that valuation in roughly three months. The growth that justifies the markup, on the run-rate side, is real. The growth in run-rate-to-valuation multiple is also real: at $30 billion run rate and a $900 billion price, the company would be trading at a 30x revenue multiple on annualised, not actual, revenue. That’s high even by 2026 AI standards, and it’s the number any due diligence pass will linger on.

The buyer-side math is straightforward. Enterprise customers spending more than $1 million a year now make up roughly 80% of Anthropic’s revenue, with more than 1,000 such customers on file. That’s the recurring base investors are pricing. Claude Code and the Cowork enterprise tier are doing the heavy lifting on growth, and the addressable expansion into finance, life sciences, and healthcare is the story underwriting the multiple.

What this means for you

If you’re building on Claude, the takeaway is that capacity isn’t going to get cheaper this quarter. A $50 billion war chest funds a lot of Trainium chip purchases, but it also funds a lot of contracted compute, which historically gets allocated to enterprise tiers first. Watch whether Anthropic ramps the Pro plan limits or holds them where they are. If they hold, the implicit message is that retail Claude usage is being rationed in favor of enterprise.

If you’re a competitor, the harder read is whether OpenAI counters with another raise, or lets the headline ride. With Anthropic now expected to top OpenAI’s February valuation, the bragging rights have moved. The leader of the AI capital market in mid-2026 isn’t the company with the most users. It’s the company growing run rate fastest, and right now, that’s Anthropic.