San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic, which is responsible for the Cloud family of language models, is finalizing a funding round worth 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 at around $350 billion. The volume of recent fundraising is compared to the dot com era and telecommunications creation in the late 1990s; However, the difference is that the revenue that AI companies are generating is massive. Recently, Deutsche Bank research estimated that cash burn at Anthropic will remain modest over the next 2-3 years, resulting in the company incurring losses by 2028.
‘anthropic’ cloud
By February 2026, Anthropic released Cloud Opus 4.6, a model that includes muti-agent team coordination, a 1 million token reference window, and high-end financial research functions. These tasks include screening, market intelligence and due diligence data. According to the Fortune report, the market is considering Opus 4.6 as a direct threat to the core business models of financial information and analytics firms. JPMorgan’s Mark Murphy called it “an illogical leap”, suggesting that plugin releases could replace layers of mission critical enterprise software.
For market participants looking for the intersection of Anthropic’s impact on public equities, stocks that benefit or are at risk for the company include:
- Amazon (AMZN) – Anthropic’s largest investor with $8 billion, is booking pretax profits of $9.5 billion in the third quarter of 2025 from its stake alone.
- Alphabet (GOOGL) – Invested $3.3 billion and provided TPU for cloud training.
- Nvidia (NVDA) – is not only a major GPU customer, but has also invested $10 billion in Anthropic.
- Thomson Reuters (TRI) – Cloud’s legal plugin directly targets Westlaw’s work flow and negatively impacts TRI.
- Relex (RELX) – Parent of LexisNexis, cloud legal and research tools overlap its core business and negativity also affects the company.
sigmanomics view
Anthropic’s funding round will set the tone for investment in AI technology in 2026 and even 2027 as the sector consolidates around one power structure – a heavily capitalized OpenAI and Alphabet’s DeepMind embedded in the world’s largest advertising and cloud ecosystem. Cloud Cowork’s sales of plugins to software stack companies has raised widespread concern – whether traditional SaaS business models might survive foundation models that directly own workflows rather than selling API access. Overall, if Anthropic can demonstrate a credible path to its $20-$26 billion revenue target for 2026, it could validate the AI investment concern that has been the talk of the town. However, if this is combined with a continued recessionary economic calendar in the US, we do not rule out a negative impact on the overall market. If the concerns come to fruition it could/will serve as the pullback catalyst the tech bears have been waiting for.
spx 500
Source: sigmanomics.com
From a technical perspective, the S&P 500 is currently trading in the 6900 zone, with bulls eyeing 7500, which would be a measuring step for the recent bounce. A point of caution is that the RSI bearish divergence is deepening, warning that a retracement in the index is on the horizon.
