Founders: Dario Amodei (CEO), Daniela Amodei, Chris Olah, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown
Launched: 2021
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding: $60 billion
Valuation: $900 billion
Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence
Industry: Enterprise technology
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 2 (No. 4 in 2025)

Anthropic has earned the top spot on this year’s Disruptor 50 list with growth that is remarkable and a valuation that is said to now top that of its chief rival OpenAI, whose 2022 ChatGPT debut was the breakout moment of the AI era but whose enterprise growth has trailed Anthropic.

“Anthropic has always been building towards and prioritizing enterprise businesses,” co-founder and president Daniela Amodei said in an interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. “From day one, we launched our first product just about three years ago, and really out of the gate we said, ‘we’re prioritizing building for businesses for a variety of reasons.’ Whether that’s coding or financial analysis or writing or editing. There’s so many different applications of what these large language models can do,” she said.

Within the past year, she says it’s not the focus but the rate of acceleration that has changed. “Particularly over the past three to six months … I think what we’re seeing is the combination of the models getting smarter, the products getting better, and that really sort of generating a huge amount of value for businesses,” she said.

Anthropic recently said internal planning for 10-fold growth was far off the mark, as revenue and usage increased 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis. “Just crazy. … Too hard to handle,” was how her brother and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the growth rate while speaking to developers at a recent Anthropic conference.

But the artificial intelligence startup, founded five years ago by former OpenAI execs, has handled the past year incredibly well.

With growth fueled by its Claude AI models, especially its Claude Code — which sparked a sector-wide selloff this year among enterprise software firms with billions in market cap and decades of success upended — Anthropic’s revenue run rate surpassed $30 billion on an annualized basis, up from $9 billion at the end of last year.

Investors are pouring cash into a new round of financing that would reportedly value Anthropic at $900 billion, which would make it worth more than OpenAI. The company has not confirmed any deal. A valuation in that range would also represent a stunning rise in a short period of time. In February, Anthropic closed a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation, a deal which itself doubled the figure from a September 2025 deal.

The biggest AI spenders of all in the tech sector are flooding Anthropic with money, with recent deals including $5 billion from Microsoft, $10 billion from Nvidia, another $25 billion in commitments from Amazon, and up to $40 billion from Google over time, as it races to meet demand for compute.

“It’s a challenge for the entire industry,” Amodei told CNBC. “The rate at which businesses and individuals are adopting these models is completely unprecedented. The industry as a whole is kind of grappling with this challenge around there’s so much demand to use Claude and other tools, and I think in general, we’re working towards creating more supply so that we are able to keep up with it.”

Anthropic continues to deliver incremental improvements in its core models, with Claude Opus 4.7 released in April. But it was the recent, highly limited debut of Claude Mythos Preview that shows both the massive potential and dangers in its breakthrough AI. The model can exploit decades of cybersecurity vulnerabilities inside governments, banks and technology firms, a discovery that led to rushed meetings between the Trump administration and top market executives.

“Every company and defender that we have worked with has further reinforced our feeling that this model is different,” Amodei said. “The capabilities of it are very powerful. There’s a lot of good that we think is going to be able to be done with the Mythos model, but we also need to be really cautious and careful about how we grant access.”

The accomplishments over the past year are all the more remarkable in light of a very public battle with the Trump administration over use of AI by the Pentagon. The Department of Defense blacklisted Anthropic earlier this year, designating it a supply chain risk.

But more recently, the government, and even the DoD, have indicated an openness to working with Anthropic, especially on issues like Mythos, with Department of Defense CTO Emil Michael recently telling CNBC that the advanced cyber capabilities of the AI model are a “separate national security moment.”

“Our long-standing history of productive partnership with with the government gives me a lot of hope that we have more in common than than we don’t,” Amodei said. “I absolutely believe that there will be plenty of work to go around and a path forward there,” she added.

Anthropic has successfully navigated a challenging AI moment, leading with a safety-first message that has engendered support from tech peers, enterprise clients, and some public goodwill. But like OpenAI, it will continue to face rising levels of public concern about the technology itself and the aims of trillion-dollar tech firms.

“We always try to train the most capable and safest models available on the market. I think that’s always been a huge selling point for us, particularly in this very competitive landscape. … That is something that I think our customers really value about Anthropic,” Amodei said.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/05/19/anthropic-cnbc-disruptor-50-ranking.html?shem=rimspwouoe,