Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H in late May at a $965 billion valuation, leapfrogging OpenAI's $852 billion mark set just two months earlier. Together the two largest foundation labs have absorbed 14% of all global venture capital in 2025. The last time a single technology category commanded this share of global private capital and this level of infrastructure-layer excitement was the late 1990s, when Nortel Networks carried 75% of North America's internet backbone traffic and peaked at a $366 billion market cap. In 2009, it filed for bankruptcy.

The structural parallel may be warning about where value accumulates in infrastructure cycles. Foundation model funding doubled in Q1 2026 versus all of 2025, with capital increasingly concentrated in a handful of labs. Anthropic’s revenue trajectory is genuinely unprecedented: the company crossed $30 billion annualized run rate by early April 2026, having generated roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. Salesforce took two decades to reach that figure. But revenue growth at the infrastructure layer does not determine who captures the value the infrastructure enables, and investors are beginning to price in a........

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