Taking many by surprise, Anthropic has raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round, reaching a total valuation of $900 billion, which surpasses OpenAI’s last reported valuation of $730 billion. But what led investors to choose the initially smaller Claude, despite ChatGPT’s stronghold in generative AI?
Launched on March 14, 2023, Claude AI, developed by Anthropic, is a conversation AI assistant used for long-term contextual understanding, coding, and deep data analysis. With an estimated 300 million monthly users, the AI is known for its human, natural tone and is appreciated for imitating writing styles easily.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was introduced two years before Claude, has multiple features, including image analysis, voice recognition, and complex reasoning. The general-purpose AI has around 800 million weekly users and is used for something as simple as homework, to more complicated things such as video generation.
A key difference between Claude and ChatGPT is the correlation between their number of users and the revenue they earn. Despite ChatGPT having a larger user base and distinguishing features such as image generation, the company only manages to produce around $25 billion in annualised revenue. However, Anthropic reported $47 billion in annualised revenue from just 300 million monthly users.
Claude’s pro subscription plans start at ₹2,000 monthly, which is significantly higher than ChatGPT plans, which start at ₹399 per month. However, Claude offers a more powerful model at its beginning rates while ChatGPT’s more powerful models are only offered at higher price ranges, with the best model being offered at ₹19,900 per month.
Claude uses this premium positioning, emphasising the higher Software Engineering Benchmark (SWE bench) for the ₹2,000 investment, leading to users opting for the subscription plan that offers better models at lower prices. The benchmark measures how well the assistant can solve real software engineering tasks, making it an important indicator for coding-focused users.
Investors are betting on this, assuming that Claude’s pro users who rely on it for coding and ad-free workflows will generate far more revenue per person. While ChatGPT remains the default AI assistant for the mass market, the economic value derived from each user and the fast growth of the company are what make Claude popular among investors.
