Anthropic Hits $380 B Valuation, Surpassing Top Indian IT Firms as Military Seeks Open

Anthropic’s latest funding round catapulted its valuation to $380 billion, a figure that now eclipses the combined market capitalisation of India’s three largest IT conglomerates—Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro—according to The Times of India. The surge follows a $13 billion Series F round that lifted the company’s valuation to $183 billion earlier this year, as reported by TechCrunch, and reflects the market’s appetite for “foundational” AI models that can be customised for enterprise workloads.

The valuation jump coincides with a high‑stakes showdown in Washington. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pressed Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, to grant the Pentagon unrestricted access to the firm’s Claude models for classified missions, including autonomous weapon systems and domestic surveillance, according to a report by the Financial Times. Hegseth warned that failure to comply by the Friday deadline could see Anthropic removed from the department’s supply chain or subject to the Defense Production Act, a Cold‑War‑era authority that allows the president to commandeer private industry for national‑security purposes.

Anthropic’s refusal to sign a blanket “lawful‑military‑use” waiver stems from concerns over the ethical implications of fully autonomous lethal operations, a stance echoed in internal briefings cited by the Financial Times. The company has instead offered a more limited partnership that would subject any military deployment of its models to human‑in‑the‑loop oversight and a transparent audit trail. Hegseth’s ultimatum underscores a broader push by the U.S. defence establishment to lock in AI capabilities from the sector’s leading labs—Google, OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic—before rival nations close the gap, as noted by the same FT source.

Financially, Anthropic’s growth appears sustainable. Reuters disclosed that the firm now generates roughly $3 billion in annualised revenue, driven by a surge in enterprise contracts for its Claude Opus 4.6 model, which boasts a 1‑million‑token context window and “agent‑team” functionality designed to compete directly with OpenAI’s Codex platform. The new capabilities, highlighted by VentureBeat, enable developers to build complex, multi‑step workflows that can be deployed across cloud and on‑premise environments, expanding Anthropic’s addressable market beyond pure consumer chat applications.

Analysts see the valuation as a bellwether for the broader AI market, where investors are betting heavily on the next wave of “foundational” models that can be fine‑tuned for industry‑specific tasks. The Times of India’s comparison to Indian IT giants illustrates how quickly AI firms are reshaping the tech hierarchy, while the Pentagon’s aggressive courting of Anthropic signals that government demand will be a critical growth engine. Whether Anthropic will acquiesce to the defence secretary’s demands—or risk being sidelined in a strategic arena—remains the pivotal question as the company navigates the twin pressures of market expectations and ethical responsibility.