Historic Moment! Anthropic Valuation Soars Past Trillion Dollars, Overtakes OpenAI for First Time

Over the past few weeks, the hottest company in Silicon Valley's private equity secondary market has turned out to be Anthropic.

on unlisted equity trading platforms such as Forge Global.Anthropic The company's valuation is approaching $1 trillion, with some sellers offering even more, at $1.05 trillion to $1.15 trillion.

https://app.ventuals.com/trade/anthropic

https://x.com/rahulxkm/status/2046739841606623568

By comparison, OpenAI is valued at about $880 billion on comparable platforms, slightly higher than its $852 billion funding valuation in March of this year, but has trailed Anthropic in terms of trading fervor.

This set of price changes rewrote market sentiment first.

In the past two years, OpenAI has always been at the core of the AI circle, with the largest user mind, the most complete product spillover effect and the strongest brand recognition.

Anthropic has long played the role of a high-quality chaser, with outstanding modeling capabilities, a restrained organizational style, and relatively restrained business moves.

The secondary market gave a new ordering first this time, and money began to see Anthropic as a scarcer chip with a steeper upward slope.

Scarcity of secondary market first deals

Re-trading consensus

Price updates for unlisted companies rely heavily on financing rounds and secondary transfers.

The former is less frequent, and the latter is more likely to reflect short-term supply and demand.Anthropic's rise this round came first from a rapid contraction in supply.

Three months ago, Anthropic's latest funding round valued it at around $380 billion.

In a short period of time, secondary market offers have more than doubled.

For existing shareholders, such a rise comes too quickly and the willingness to hold naturally increases.

A number of holders have been receiving frequent takeover bids lately, but few are actually willing to ship.

There are only a limited number of shares outstanding in the market to begin with, and as soon as the selling order shrinks, the price jumps up quickly.

The change is more pronounced on the buy side.

Growth funds, family offices and late-stage institutional investors are focused on Anthropic for one core reason: headline AI assets still haven't really opened up to the public markets, and with primary shares highly closed, the secondary market has become one of the few entrances where you can still get on board.

When a group of funds are chasing a very small number of chips at the same time, prices can quickly move out of their regular rhythm and into a range dominated by expectations.

At this stage, the offer no longer corresponds only to how much the company is worth at the moment, but also to a judgment about whether Anthropic has a chance to become one of the few, most certain AI platform companies in the next few years.

Anthropic is revalued

It's all about revenue growth and the Claude Code.

Anthropic's popularity is not driven by market sentiment alone.

Closer to the logic of the deal, it has recently come up with two results that are easily priced in by capital: the rate of revenue growth and the product extensibility represented by Claude Code.

Revenue growth determines the bottom of valuation.

Modeling capabilities can be approximated in six months, and stable commercialization curves are more difficult to replicate.

Investment organizations are more willing to pay for consistently growing corporate revenues because it represents a company that has begun to turn its technological advantage into repeatable, scalable cash flow expectations.

For today's AI companies, whoever establishes the revenue structure first is more likely to get higher multiples.

Claude Code, on the other hand, raised the valuation ceiling.

Programming is one of the easiest scenarios for AI to cash in on its value, with frequent use and more measurable results.

Developers are willing to pay for efficiency, and organizations are willing to pay for a stable workflow.

As long as the market believes Anthropic has room for continued expansion in code generation, Agent collaboration, and enterprise-class development tools, its identity will shift from a modeling company to an infrastructure company that may occupy the development portal.

The capital market is willing to give the latter higher imagination.

Discount on OpenAI

Caution from a High Start

The fact that OpenAI has lost steam in the secondary market does not equate to a reversal of its fundamentals.

OpenAI is still the center of the industry in terms of branding, distribution and product coverage.

The problem is mainly that the valuation starts from too high a point.

The $852 billion financing valuation has written into the price of the market's optimistic expectations for its growth in the coming years.

Continuing to buy at a premium in this position, investors need greater certainty that revenue is being cashed in quickly enough, organizational control is solid enough, and the path to profitability is clear enough.

Another reason is that the OpenAI story has been discussed enough by the market.

ChatGPT's user scale, multimodal layout, enterprise product line, Agent direction and platform ambitions are all in high visibility.

High visibility pays cognitive dividends and compresses the room for short-term surprises.

OpenAI remains a high-quality asset for secondary market buyers, but it's hard to dismiss it as a deal that has yet to complete discovery.

Anthropic is at a different stage.

It has fewer chips, a faster narrative update, and is still in a period of rapid price revaluation.

The secondary market has a natural preference for this asset class because it is more resilient and sentiment is more likely to drive deals.

The Forge platform amplifies prices and amplifies emotions.

Platforms like Forge Global have played the role of amplifiers in this valuation upswing.

https://forgeglobal.com/anthropic_stock/

Financing prices in the primary market are slow to update and tend to be formed only among a few institutions.

Secondary platforms bring together fragmented buyers and sellers, making it easier for each inquiry, listing and transaction to become a new price anchor.

Once a particular high offer has been widely disseminated in the market, sellers are further shy of selling and buyers fear that the next price will be higher.

The psychology of both supply and demand is reinforced.

This is the most distinctive feature of the secondary market for private placements, where prices often precede changes in fundamentals.

In particular, with headline AI companies generally in no hurry to go public and primary shares locked up by long-term funds, the secondary market has taken up a lot of allocation demand that would otherwise have gone nowhere.

The rapid upward movement of prices has both a bubble component and a real-world basis in the supply structure.

Capital is starting to rearrange the valuation logic of AI companies

Anthropic's overtaking of OpenAI in the secondary market is ostensibly a reversal of an equity offer, but behind it is a migration of pricing logic for AI companies.

Earlier, the market was mainly comparing who had stronger models and more users.

By today's date, investors are increasingly concerned about another set of questions; who has access to high-frequency, high-paying, and verifiable scenarios, who can plug models into stable workflows, who can control developer and enterprise entrances, and who can turn technology leadership into revenue and platform position.

Anthropic's higher chase price due to Claude Code and revenue growth, and OpenAI's slower chase price due to over-valuation and over-expectation, actually illustrate the same thing: the value judgment of AI companies is shifting from model ranking to entry control and commercial delivery.

The secondary market simply aligned this change with valuations much earlier.

References:

https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-trillion-dollar-valuation-on-secondary-markets-2026

This article is from WeChat"New Zeal."(math.) genus