Anthropic is closing a $30 billion funding round at a valuation above $900 billion, with Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Altimeter Capital, and Greenoaks Capital Partners as co-leads. [1] Each co-lead is committing approximately $2 billion. [2] The round, expected to close as soon as this week, makes the Claude maker the most valuable private artificial intelligence company in history, ahead of OpenAI's $852 billion valuation set in March. [1] The same week, in the Vatican's Synod Hall, Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical on artificial intelligence, and Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah sat on the dais and read remarks about how commercial incentives "conflict with doing the right thing." [3]

The paper has been tracking the round since May 23, wrote Sunday's feature on three of the four co-leads also backing OpenAI, and ran Monday's brief on the trade-press follow-up. What changed Tuesday is the close itself and the encyclical's full text on the same calendar.

The math

In March 2025, Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion. By September 2025, $183 billion. In February 2026, the Series G closed at $380 billion post-money — the first $30 billion raise of the year. [4] By May 13, the Financial Times had reported Anthropic was in talks for a second $30 billion at $900 billion. [5] By May 15 those terms were agreed. [6] By the week of May 22, the round had aggregated commitments to close. [1] The valuation has multiplied roughly fifteen times in fourteen months on the same business, the same products, and substantially the same market.

The revenue is what carries the multiple. Anthropic told investors its annualized run rate will exceed $50 billion by the end of June, up from a $4 billion run rate in July 2025. [1] The company expects to report $10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter, more than double the prior three-month period, and is on pace for its first profitable quarter. [1] At $50 billion annualized and a $900 billion pre-money mark, the company trades at roughly 18x annualized revenue going in — a multiple that drops to 12x at the run-rate exit. The FT's Anthropic note describes annualized revenue as expected to "surpass $45 billion shortly, up fivefold from $9 billion at the end of last year." [7]

For comparison: Microsoft trades at 13x trailing revenue. Nvidia trades at 26x trailing revenue. Anthropic, growing 5x year-over-year on a $9 billion base into a $45 billion exit, is being priced like Nvidia, not like Microsoft. The bet is on the growth holding, not on the multiple staying put.

The investor structure

Three of the four co-leads — Dragoneer, Sequoia, Altimeter — also hold large positions in OpenAI. [8] Dragoneer invested approximately $3 billion in OpenAI last year. Sequoia first backed OpenAI in 2021. Altimeter's chief executive Brad Gerstner has hosted Sam Altman on his podcast and publicly promoted OpenAI in interviews. [8] If the round closes at $900 billion, these three firms will hold major stakes simultaneously in the world's two most valuable AI companies, both private.

This is what the paper meant by the co-investor finding. It is not a conflict in the legal sense; venture capital firms have always held positions across competing companies. It is a positioning fact. The smartest money in growth-stage technology has decided the two leading AI labs together are worth more than $1.75 trillion combined as private entities. Either or both could become public companies before the end of 2026; both have been reported to be considering IPO paths.

The encyclical, on the same calendar

Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, published Monday — argues that "AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data." [9] It does not name companies. It does not need to. The week the encyclical landed is the week Anthropic agreed terms with co-investors that already hold stakes in its main competitor, at a $900 billion valuation that did not exist three months earlier, in front of a U.S. President who in three days posted three positions on a war and ordered a military strike on Iran. The encyclical is text. The round is data. They were always going to share a calendar.

Olah's remarks at the Vatican were Anthropic's most direct public engagement of the framing the encyclical proposes: that frontier AI labs operate "inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing." [3] He named the incentives — commercial viability, research-frontier pressure, geopolitics, pride and ambition. He named them on the day his company's valuation closed at nine hundred billion dollars. A reader of Michael Lewis recognizes this as the structure of a particular kind of moment: the founder who admits the system's pressures aloud is also the founder whose company is most rewarded by them.

This is not hypocrisy. It is dual-track communication. Anthropic publishes a Responsible Scaling Policy and accepts a Vatican invitation; Anthropic also accepts $30 billion at $900 billion. Both happen. The lab's frame is that doing both is the only way to do safety work that matters; without the capital, the safety work cannot scale. The lab's critics frame is that the safety work is window dressing for capital accumulation. The Vatican took the position that dialogue with one of the labs was worth doing. The other four labs were not present on the dais.

What MSM and X are doing with this

Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the major tech trade press are covering the close as a deal-page story. [10] [5] None has connected the round's timing to Magnifica Humanitas. The Vatican is, in their frame, a different beat. On X, the discussion compresses to bubble debates: whether $900 billion at 18x is reasonable, whether the IPO market in Q4 2026 can absorb both Anthropic and OpenAI, whether private secondary markets will keep the bid up. [11] The encyclical is treated as separate cultural news. It is not.

The paper's frame: when the largest AI raise in history closes the same week a Pope co-bills a co-founder of that lab and the Vatican press release explicitly warns of capital concentration, these are the same story. The $900 billion valuation is the financial-layer evidence the encyclical implicitly cites. Anthropic's choice to send Olah to read the encyclical's framing aloud is the political-layer evidence that one frontier lab now publicly accepts the framing while four others remain silent.

The IPO question is downstream. The encyclical question is structural. Whether Anthropic's first profitable quarter, expected in Q2 2026, lands as projected or as guidance, [1] the company is now in front of a corpus of papal teaching that will be read for the next century. The corpus arrived first. The round closed second. The encyclical wins, on the timeline that matters.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco