Artificial intelligence technologies continue to fundamentally reshape the global financial system and digital markets. Recent data from Bloomberg indicates that the battle between the industry’s two primary titans—Anthropic and OpenAI—has entered a critical new phase.
Anthropic set to close the largest funding round in history
Anthropic is on the verge of closing its largest financing round to date. According to Bloomberg insiders, this upcoming funding round is expected to top $30 billion. Following this investment, Anthropic’s total market capitalization could be valued above $900 billion.
This investment round is poised to completely upend the balance of power in the global AI landscape:
- This valuation would make Anthropic more valuable than its chief rival, OpenAI, cementing it as the most valuable private company in the world.
- The financing round is being co-led by some of the most influential names in the venture capital market—Sequoia, Dragoneer, Altimeter, and Greenoaks Capital—with each expected to invest $2 billion. The process could close as early as next week.
- Anthropic has proven its explosive growth trajectory to investors, projecting that its annualized run-rate revenue will surpass $50 billion by the end of next month.
This massive global financial momentum is already reflecting in concrete figures within Uzbekistan’s digital market. According to the Tax Committee’s Q1 2026 report, competing AI platforms have, for the first time, landed side-by-side in the official taxpayer rankings of our country’s digital economy.
In terms of gross turnover from digital services provided by foreign tech companies, the top AI leaders recorded the following metrics:
- OpenAI (ChatGPT): 21.5 billion UZS
- Anthropic (Claude): 12.6 billion UZS
Currently, OpenAI maintains a 1.7x lead over its rival in terms of service volume in Uzbekistan. However, market analysts note that this gap does not reflect a technical disparity. Rather, ChatGPT simply entered the Uzbekistan market much earlier and successfully built a broad user base. Anthropic (Claude), on the other hand, was only recently added to the national tax registry and managed to achieve such a substantial figure within a remarkably short window.
How much did Anthropic earn and pay in taxes in Uzbekistan?
Through paid premium subscriptions and business/developer API services for the Claude platform, Anthropic generated a total of 12.6 billion UZS from Uzbek users in the first quarter of the year and contributed approximately 1.51 billion UZS in taxes to Uzbekistan’s state budget. For comparison, OpenAI paid roughly 2.58 billion UZS in taxes during the same period.
Because Anthropic is officially new to the Uzbekistan market, it is not possible to compare its year-over-year growth dynamics in percentages. However, capturing nearly 60% of the market volume held by an established incumbent like OpenAI during its debut quarter demonstrates a rapidly expanding demand for the Claude ecosystem among local users and business entities, highlighting a powerful growth trajectory.
As Anthropic targets a $900 billion valuation globally and challenges OpenAI’s hegemony, it is simultaneously disrupting OpenAI’s monopoly on the ground in Uzbekistan. Local developers and enterprises are increasingly willing to allocate larger budgets to highly capable AI models. How Claude sustains its growth momentum in the coming quarters and how quickly it closes the 1.7x gap with OpenAI will be one of the most compelling narratives for digital market analysts to watch.
