According to Bloomberg, Anthropic is testing how far AI valuations can go — pushing the entire AI trade into a new, quite extreme phase. The company aims to raise at least $30 billion at a potential valuation above $900 billion, and is also considering an IPO as soon as this fall; the fresh capital is intended to cover the brutal compute demands and further scaling of Claude. Google, meanwhile, only recently invested $10 billion at a valuation of around $350 billion and has the option on the table to add another $30 billion if Anthropic meets certain technical and internal milestones — the new round would therefore practically triple the valuation within a few months based solely on expected growth and investor FOMO.

For equity investors the signal is twofold: on one hand, it’s clear that capital is willing to fund AI champions at near-“megacap” valuations even before an IPO, because investors believe in the strength of the models, the brand, and long-term dominance in generative AI. On the other hand, such aggressive valuation of a private company competing with OpenAI for a leadership position raises the bar for public AI names as well — the higher expectations climb in the private world, the less room remains for a safe “re-rating” of stocks, and the more the entire AI trade starts to behave like the classic late stage of a bubble, where the question becomes who can sell the story to whom for a higher price before capacity and monetization realities burst it.