Anthropic’s rise is giving some OpenAI investors second thoughts
OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation is facing skepticism from some of its own investors as the company tries to refocus around enterprise customers and fend off Anthropic. according to the Financial Times.
Anthropic’s annual revenue rose from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion at the end of March, largely due to demand for its coding tools. One investor who has backed both companies told the FT that justifying the OpenAI round would require assuming an IPO value of $1.2 trillion or more, making Anthropic’s current valuation of $380 billion look like a relative bargain.
The secondary market is telling a similar story right now, where demand for Anthropic stock has become almost insatiable, while OpenAI stock is trading at a discount.
Altman has been here before. During his tenure leading Y Combinator, aggressive valuation inflation left some portfolio companies financially stranded, while others proved to be worth every penny.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar pushed back, telling the FT that the company’s $122 billion capital injection – the largest private fundraising in history – was evidence of continued investor confidence. Not everyone is convinced. Jai Das, president of investment firm Sapphire Ventures (which has no stake in either company) told the FT that he saw OpenAI as “the Netscape of AI,” a reference to the once-dominant browser that was overtaken by Microsoft and eventually absorbed by AOL.
Update: This piece has been updated to remove an investor quote published and later deleted by the Financial Times.
