AI is still where the money is flowing…

A Bloomberg report late Tuesday revealed that Anthropic, the maker of Claude, is in early discussions with investors to raise at least $30 billion at an eye-popping valuation of nearly $900 billion.

Clearly, this could become the largest funding round to date for founder Dario Amodei.

The Claude maker is in discussions to raise the new capital at a valuation of more than $900 billion, not including the investment, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is private. The round is expected to close as soon as the end of this month, one person said. The deal is not finalized and no term sheet has been signed. -BBG

Talks of a new funding round at a valuation above $900 billion follow Google’s $10 billion investment at a $35 billion valuation earlier this year, with an additional $3 billion contingent on performance milestones. Amazon is also investing $5 billion at the same valuation, with plans to add $2 billion over time.

Anthropic could be poised for an initial public offering as soon as October, according to a separate Bloomberg report.

Earlier, the outlet reported that Anthropic has warned investors about unauthorized sellers of its shares on secondary marketplaces, calling them “stock scams,” and that some sellers are issuing fraudulent share certificates.

Anthropic specifically warned about new offerings from secondary platforms Hiive and Forge Global. Anthropic also named Sydecar, Open Door Partners, Lionheart Ventures, UpMarket, Unicorns Exchange, and Pachamama.

Shifting to a new note from UBS about its latest semi-annual Enterprise AI survey, analyst Timothy Arcuri and his team surveyed IT executives at 139 companies about their AI initiatives.

Arcuri found that “the survey continues to point to Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia as the key enterprise AI winners, but with Anthropic gaining ground.”

Arcuri added more color about OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia:

The progress made by OpenAI and Anthropic in the enterprise market was evident in this survey.

OpenAI ranked #1 again in terms of the most popular AI model provider to enterprises, #2 for general-purpose AI tools with ChatGPT, and #3 in coding with OpenAI Codex.

Anthropic made solid ground in the enterprise, notably moving into the #2 position in the AI coding arena with Claude Code.

Nvidia remained the dominant choice for AI chips among enterprises, with Google, surprisingly, slipping in several categories. Among the SaaS/apps firms, it was not surprising to see ServiceNow in ITSM AI and Salesforce in CRM AI stand out.

The survey again pointed to strong AI pull-through in data spend, with the most material pull-through for cloud data lakes and analytics, a tailwind for Snowflake, Databricks, and the hyperscalers. We offer our key survey takeaways for the cybersecurity space in a separate note.

Polymarket odds:

Will Anthropic not IPO by June 30, 2026?
Yes 98% · No 2%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

Meanwhile, OpenAI has not set an official IPO date. The latest reporting suggests it has been laying the groundwork for a public listing, with a possible filing in the second half of 2026.

So potentially, in the back half of the year, there will be multiple IPOs of top chatbot startups …