OpenAI’s towering private valuation is coming under renewed scrutiny as rival Anthropic accelerates its revenue growth and pulls in surging investor interest, according to reporting originally from the Financial Times.
OpenAI is currently valued at around $852 billion, a figure some existing backers now appear to be questioning. The company is in the midst of a strategic shift toward enterprise customers while trying to keep pace with Anthropic, which is rapidly expanding on the back of its AI coding products.
Anthropic’s annualised revenue has jumped sharply, from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by the end of March. This growth is being driven largely by demand for the company’s coding tools, a key battleground in the broader AI platform race.
That revenue trajectory is influencing how some investors compare the two companies’ price tags. One investor with exposure to both OpenAI and Anthropic told the Financial Times that making sense of OpenAI’s recent fundraising round requires assuming an eventual IPO valuation of $1.2 trillion or more. Against that backdrop, Anthropic’s roughly $380 billion valuation is being framed by that investor as the relative bargain.
The secondary market is reflecting a similar mood shift. Demand for Anthropic shares is described as nearly insatiable, while OpenAI stock is reportedly trading at a discount on private exchanges. Taken together, those signals suggest that, at least for now, more late‑stage buyers see upside in Anthropic relative to OpenAI’s already lofty price.
OpenAI’s leadership is pushing back on the idea that investor enthusiasm is cooling. CFO Sarah Friar told the Financial Times that the company’s $122 billion raise — described as the largest private fundraising in history underlines continued confidence from deep-pocketed backers. That capital haul gives OpenAI significant firepower as it doubles down on enterprise adoption and infrastructure.
Still, not everyone watching the sector is convinced the current valuation will be easy to grow into. Jai Das, president of investment firm Sapphire Ventures, who does not hold stakes in either company, told the Financial Times he views OpenAI as “the Netscape of AI.” It’s a loaded comparison: Netscape was an early, defining force in web browsing but was eventually overtaken by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and later absorbed by AOL.
For Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, the debate over valuation inflation may feel familiar. During his time leading startup accelerator Y Combinator, some portfolio companies saw their sky‑high valuations become a liability when growth failed to catch up, while others went on to justify or exceed those expectations. The current tension between OpenAI’s price and Anthropic’s growth echoes that earlier era of exuberant private-market pricing and uneven outcomes.
Behind the numbers is a broader question facing the AI sector; how to value frontier model companies whose products, market power and regulatory landscape are all evolving at speed. Anthropic’s rapid revenue expansion via coding tools gives investors a more concrete growth story to underwrite. OpenAI, with a far higher valuation and record-breaking fundraising, is being asked to prove that it can convert its early lead and brand strength into durable enterprise revenue at a scale few software companies have ever achieved.