Anthropic nears OpenAI in funding but ChatGPT has 51x more traffic

Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI engineers, is negotiating a $2B funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, valuing the AI startup at $60B — more than triple its valuation from a year ago. That would make Anthropic the fifth most valuable U.S. startup, behind SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks, per CB Insights. The round would bring Anthropic's total raised since 2021 to $16.7B, with Amazon contributing $8B and Google at least $3B. For comparison, OpenAI has raised $21.9B — just 31% more.

Despite the funding parity, user adoption tells a different story. ChatGPT attracted 128 million monthly visitors in January, while Anthropic's Claude had only 2.5 million — a 51x gap. Enterprise cloud adoption follows the same trend: 63% of organizations use OpenAI models vs. 31% for Anthropic, according to Wiz. Meanwhile, low-cost competitor DeepSeek is gaining traction, with its latest model downloaded 130,000 times on Hugging Face and on-premise adoption doubling to 7% in January alone. In other AI startup news, former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever is raising funding for Safe Superintelligence at a potential $20B+ valuation, while ex-CTO Mira Murati seeks $100M for her venture.