Anthropic's Massive $20 Billion Round of Funding Signals a Powerful New Phase of AI Capital - Sigmanomics

Anthropic, the San Francisco based AI company that is responsible for the Claude family of language models is finalizing a funding round of more than $20 billion, according to the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Expected to close in the second week of February, this round of funding will value the company around $350 billion. The magnitude of recent fundraises draws comparison to that of dot com era and telecommunications buildout in the late 1990’s; however, the difference is the revenue that AI companies are generating are at scale. Recently, Deutsche Bank research projected that the cash burn at Anthropic will remain modest over the next 2-3 years which should in turn lead the company to be breakeven by 2028.

Anthropic' Claude

As of February 2026, Anthropic released Claude opus 4.6, a model that features muti-agent team coordination, a 1 – million token context window, and high end financial research tasks. These tasks are to include screening, market intelligence, and due diligence data. As reported by Fortune, the market is interpreting Opus 4.6 to be a direct threat to the core business models of financial information and analytics firms. JP Morgan’s Mark Murphy called it “an illogical leap,” suggesting the plugin release could replace layers of mission critical enterprise software.

For market participants looking for cross impact of Anthropic’s influence across public equities, stocks that benefit from or are threaten by the company include:

Amazon (AMZN) – Largest investor of Anthropic at $8 billion, booking $9.5 billion pretax in Q3 2025 from its stake alone.
Alphabet (GOOGL) – Invested $3.3 billion and provides TPUs for Claude training.
Nvidia (NVDA) – Not only is a major GPU customer, but has committed $10 billion in investment into Anthropic.
Thomson Reuters (TRI) – The legal plugin from Claude directly targets Westlaw’s work flow and negatively effects TRI.
Relx (RELX) -The parent of LexisNexis, Claude’s legal and research tools overlap its core business and also negativity affects the company.

The Sigmanomics View

The funding round from Anthropic will set the tone for investing in AI technology for 2026 and even into 2027 as the sector consolidates around a power structure – a heavily capitalized OpenAI and Alphabet’s DeepMind embedded in the world’s largest advertising and cloud ecosystem. The selloff of software stack companies lead by Claude Cowork’s plugins has triggered wide concern – whether traditional Saas business models can survive foundation models that own workflows directly rather than selling API access. In all, if Anthropic can display a credible path to its $20-$26 billion target in revenue for 2026, it could validate the AI investment concern that has been the talk of the town. However, if it stumbles paired with continued downbeat economic calendar in the U.S., we do not rule out a negative spillover in the overall market. This can/will serve as the pullback catalyst technical bears have been waiting for if concerns come to fruition.

SPX 500

From a technical standpoint, the S&P 500 is currently trading in the 6900 zone, with bulls eying 7500, which will be the measure move on the recent upswing. Worth caution is deepening RSI bearish divergence, warning that a retracement in the index is on the horizon.