Temasek and GIC could earn over 100% on their stake in Anthropic. Why did they bet on Claude?

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Singapore’s investment companies are riding the AI wave, hoping to capitalise on the boom in the industry. Just slightly over three weeks ago, both Temasek and GIC raised their investment in one of the most promising foundational AI companies, Anthropic, the developers of Claude AI.

It was the second round for Temasek and the third for GIC, after earlier rounds in Feb 2026 and Sept last year.

While we don’t know how much money each of them put in exactly, although GIC co-led two of the latest rounds and Business Times suggested that we’re talking about “billions,” what we do know is what the valuation of Anthropic was at each stage (all the figures are post-money):

• Series F (Sept 2025): US$183 billion
• Series G (Feb 2026): US$380 billion
• Series H (May 2026): US$965 billion

This is important because, next to SpaceX and OpenAI, Anthropic is the most anticipated trillion-dollar tech IPO of the year. Polymarket bets have the odds of it reaching as high as US$1.8 trillion at around 50% or more when it goes public sometime in the fall.

This means that institutional investors are looking at a nearly two-fold return just over the Series H, and as much as 10x since Sept 2025. Not bad for just one year.

This could very well be one of the best investments ever made by Singapore’s funds, which raises a question—why Anthropic and not OpenAI? Why Claude and not ChatGPT?

Less is more

After all, it was ChatGPT that launched the AI revolution in Nov 2022. Since then, all other companies have been seen more as followers than leaders of the race. Google famously suffered a string of embarrassments with its early Bard service, while OpenAI kept gaining steam, leaving competition in the dust.

Today, Google has caught up, after years of improvements and huge reach owed to its search engine monopoly. Both ChatGPT and Gemini are now serving close to 1 billion users each month. Meanwhile, Claude is estimated to be used by anywhere between 20 and 50 million people. Tens of times fewer.

And yet, in terms of revenue, it reportedly pulls in about twice what OpenAI does (close to US$50 billion vs US$25 billion in annualised run rate as of Apr/ May 2026).

The big shake-up came last year, when Anthropic had its own breakthrough moment—the launch of Claude Code.

The smart coding agent allowed it to capture the most lucrative part of the market: the enterprise customer. Corporations around the world quickly adopted CC to vastly improve and increase their in-house coding capabilities, as it was the first agentic AI tool that operated with high accuracy.

OpenAI may have millions of people paying 20 bucks to use ChatGPT, but Anthropic has thousands of companies paying thousands, if not millions, of dollars for intelligent enterprise automation.

The contrast couldn’t be starker: about 85% of Anthropic’s revenue comes from business customers, while 85% of OpenAI’s revenue comes from individual users.

This is why the former is already valued higher—US$965 billion vs US$852 billion—and is also expected to appreciate more following the IPO.

GIC’s and Temasek’s interest in and commitment to Anthropic is, therefore, hardly a surprise.

In fact, it’s quite likely that it had its source in first-hand experience, given how many different businesses both organisations have invested in. They see the tools that the corporations are using and how satisfied they are with them. And if it’s also reflected in the target company’s financials, then that seals the deal.

Anthropic’s competitors are trying to catch up, but so far, neither OpenAI nor Google have managed to create a worthy competitor. Claude Code is successful because it understands its audience: engineers living in the terminal, where Claude can do wonders, performing as a capable junior developer who needs occasional guidance and supervision, but otherwise can do the job himself.

What’s more, once an organisation adopts a technical solution, it’s very difficult to leave it. With a whole universe of plugins, untangling Claude in order to move to a different provider would only be justifiable if another company significantly outperformed it. So far, that doesn’t seem to be a risk.

Unlike fickle consumers, who can drop a subscription overnight, companies move slowly and avoid change unless it’s absolutely necessary.

While its competitors pursued mass market scale, Anthropic focused on the niche with the biggest needs and deepest pockets. This has turned out to be a masterstroke, which Singapore is about to profit from as well.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s current affairs here.

Also Read: AI salaries in S’pore rose 5x faster than overall wages, with fresh grads landing S$90K AI jobs

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