How Anthropic's enterprise dominance fueled its monster $183B valuation

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Anthropic is valued at $183 billion after a new funding round.
• The company currently serves over 300,000 enterprise customers.
• A marketing emphasis on safety could be a major driving factor.

Anthropic is soaring, and the popularity of its tools among enterprise clients is providing much of the lift.

The AI start-up announced on Tuesday that its latest funding round raised $13 billion, bringing it to a total valuation of $183 billion, an increase of close to 300% since March (when it was valued at approximately $61.5 billion). The funding round was led by investment firm ICONIQ and included capital from Fidelity, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and other investors.

Also: Why shadow AI could be the secret to fixing your company's failing AI projects

"The investment reflects Anthropic's continued momentum and reinforces our position as the leading intelligence platform for enterprises, developers, and power users," Anthropic wrote in a Tuesday blog post.

That blog post credited Anthropic's more than 300,000 business customers as a crucial factor in the company's growth, adding that this latest funding round will enable the company to "expand our capacity to meet growing enterprise demand."

So what explains Anthropic's success among enterprises?

Specialization

For one, Anthropic offers an API and industry-specific products, like Claude for Financial Services, which enable businesses "to add powerful AI to their critical applications without complex integration work," Anthropic wrote in its blog post. 

Also: Anthropic agrees to settle copyright infringement class action suit - what it means

To be fair, though, its competitors have also been taking a specialized approach to selling AI to businesses. OpenAI, for example, is reportedly building a workplace productivity platform to rival Google Workplace and Microsoft Office, and Amazon recently announced the US launch of a tool that allows brands to create short, AI-generated video ads from still images of products. So there must be more to Anthropic's strategy.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Safety

Reputation has also been key. Since its inception, Anthropic has sought to distinguish itself from its competitors as an industry leader in safety and transparency. Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei, in fact, founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving their respective positions at OpenAI, citing disagreements with the company about the best approach to building scalable and safe AI. 

Also: Anthropic wants to stop AI models from turning evil - here's how

Anthropic is far from perfect, of course. Like all chatbots, Claude is prone to hallucination, and in some extreme cases will even threaten or deceive human users if its goals are compromised. But the company has gone to great lengths to underscore its commitment to safety and alignment, even going so far as to launch an "="" program"="">. This approach is clearly resonating among business leaders who face pressure to embrace AI while simultaneously having to contend with the risks that the technology poses to data security and privacy.

Amazon partnership

Anthropic has also received billions in funding from Amazon. Through that partnership, Claude (along with several other leading models) has been made easily accessible via Amazon Bedrock to the legions of businesses that rely on Amazon Web Services, allowing Anthropic to tap into a huge enterprise customer base.

Practicality

At this point in the AI boom, marketing has been a little awkward, since it's by no means clear yet how these new technologies will fit into most individuals' day-to-day lives, or into businesses' existing workflows. Some tech leaders believe that the systems their companies are building could make much of human labor superfluous, eliminating huge numbers of jobs but also, somehow, creating the conditions for human beings to lead more meaningful and happy lives. 

Also: Anthropic beats OpenAI as the top LLM provider for business - and it's not even close

Many tech developers have been pushing AI toward businesses, claiming that agents and other tools will boost employee productivity, mainly by automating simple tasks that are a drain on human labor. But data from MIT shows 95% of businesses surveyed reported no growth from their internal use of generative AI, while another recent study shows that early efforts at human-AI collaboration in the workplace seem to make many employees more prone to burnout.

Generating computer code, however, is one domain in which LLMs have proven time and again to be legitimately useful. Claude is hugely popular among coders, which has further driven its usage among businesses.

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