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Perspective
Foundation ModelsVenture & Startup Markets

Anthropic Releases Opus 4.8, Surpasses OpenAI

May 30, 2026|2 min

A perspective from Contrary Research.

Dot-grid line chart: a blue line trails under a rising grey area, then jumps above it
  • Perspective
  • Authors1
  • Related Companies2

Anthropic had a big week. On Thursday, it announced it had raised $65 billion in a Series H led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia at a $965 billion post-money valuation, overtaking OpenAI’s $852 billion March valuation for the first time and more than doubling its valuation from the $380 billion it was valued at in February. It also reported that run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion this month. The round brought in strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix alongside the hyperscaler commitments, signaling that Anthropic is now thinking about its compute supply chain at the memory and storage layer, not just GPUs. The same day, the company launched Claude Opus 4.8, an upgrade to its flagship model available at the same price as its predecessor, with fast mode now three times cheaper than prior models.

Earlier in the week, Anthropic also confirmed it will imminently roll out Mythos-class models to all customers, having made swift progress on the cyber safeguards required for general release. As we noted in a previous newsletter, the model’s public launch has been the subject of significant debate, with regulators, bank CEOs, and cybersecurity researchers all weighing in on whether the threat was real or overstated. If the rollout proceeds, it will be the first time a model of this capability class has been made broadly available, and the first real test of whether Anthropic’s Project Glasswing safeguards hold up outside a controlled partner environment.

Authors

  • Sachin Maini

    Senior Editor

    See articles

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Authors

  • Sachin Maini

    Senior Editor

    Sachin Maini is Senior Editor of Contrary Research, where he's led the publication of 500+ company-specific reports and dozens of industry deep dives. Prior to Contrary, Sachin led content for NFX, publishing several seminal essays on network effects for the firm.

    See articles

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