In brief
- Anthropic has raised $30 billion in Series G funding at a $380 billion post-money valuation, led by GIC and Coatue.
- Elon Musk responded to the announcement by accusing Claude of hating “Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men,” calling it “misanthropic and evil.”
- The attack comes as more than a dozen senior researchers have departed his own lab, xAI.
Elon Musk called Anthropic’s AI “misanthropic and evil” on Thursday, hours after the Claude maker announced a $30 billion funding round that valued the company at $380 billion, positioning it as one of the most capitalised private companies in the world, and the most valuable AI lab outside of OpenAI.
The attack came in response to Anthropic’s tweet announcing its Series G raise, co-led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and investment firm Coatue.
“Your AI hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men,” Musk tweeted. “This is misanthropic and evil. Fix it.”
“Frankly, I don’t think there is anything you can do to escape the inevitable irony of Anthropic ending up being Misanthropic,” the billionaire added. “You were doomed to this fate when you chose your name.”
Anthropic has yet to respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.
The Tesla CEO’s attack on Anthropic lands at a difficult moment for his own AI venture, with more than a dozen senior researchers departing xAI between February 3 and 11, including co-founders Jimmy Ba and Yuhuai “Tony” Wu, who led reasoning and reported directly to Musk.
Some departures were attributed to the company’s pending integration with SpaceX; others said they were leaving to start new ventures.
AI leaders spar
Anthropic’s Series G round was co-led by D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX, with participation from Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorganChase, Temasek, the Qatar Investment Authority, and dozens of other institutional investors.
A portion of the round includes previously announced investments from Microsoft and NVIDIA.
Anthropic said its annualised run-rate revenue has now reached $14 billion, growing more than 10x annually for three consecutive years.
Claude Code alone has surpassed $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue, more than doubling since the start of 2026, with a recent analysis estimating it now authors 4% of all public GitHub commits worldwide, according to the statement.
The raise trails only OpenAI’s $40 billion SoftBank-led round last year, the company Musk co-founded in 2015 before stepping away from its board in 2018, citing a potential conflict of interest as Tesla expanded its own AI work.
Since then, the relationship between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has curdled into open warfare.
Last month, the two clashed publicly after Musk warned his followers, “Don’t let your loved ones use ChatGPT,” citing a post linking the chatbot to nine deaths, including five suicides.
Altman fired back, pointing to reports of more than 50 deaths linked to Tesla’s Autopilot and accusing Musk of hypocrisy on AI safety.
Apart from the personal feud, Musk has accused OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit mission and filed multiple lawsuits against the company in the last 2 years.
Meanwhile, competition between Anthropic and OpenAI has accelerated, with the firms releasing rival, Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex, within an hour of each other, splitting benchmark leads across enterprise reasoning and agentic coding tasks.
The rivalry has also turned public through Super Bowl ads and product jabs, with Anthropic mocking ChatGPT ads and OpenAI rolling out limited ad tests hours later as both race for enterprise AI dominance.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
Freedom Index
