👉 Background: Anthropic is an AI startup that was founded back in 2021 - by former OpenAI employees. It has developed a family of Large Language Models (LLMs) named Claude - as a competitor to ChatGPT, Grok3, DeepSeek and Google’s Gemini. Just like OpenAI has Microsoft in its corner, Anthropic is rolling deep with Amazon investing  $4 billion dollar USD in Anthropic last November.

‍👉 What happened: While OpenAI is growing - Claude is also rapidly expanding. In fact, Anthropic’s annual revenue run rate was reportedly around $1 billion last year, and, that number has increased by 30% so far in 2025.

‍👉 What else: So now, Anthropic has raised another $3.5 billion USD at a post-money valuation of $61.5 billion USD. It plans to use this cash to expand its compute capacity, deepen its research and ultimately accelerate its international expansion.

‍

‍What's the key learning?

‍

‍💡AI companies need two things to be sustainable: cutting-edge technology and a way to scale it profitably. Training AI models costs billions but so does getting them in front of users.

💡Anthropic expects to burn $3 billion USD this year. On the other hand, OpenAI lost about $5 billion USD last year and is expecting to lose up to $14 billion by 2026. Right now, AI is a game of who can outlast the competition without bleeding out financially.

💡Strategic partnerships can help AI companies get distribution without the exorbitant costs. OpenAI has a strategic partnership with Microsoft, while Google has Gemini.