Someone in Silicon Valley this week reportedly offered to swap their house for a stake in Anthropic. That detail, buried in a Business Insider report, tells you something about the state of AI investing right now that no valuation figure quite captures.
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of models, has hit a $1 trillion valuation on Forge Global, a secondary market where investors can buy shares from early employees and existing backers. That puts it ahead of OpenAI, which trades at around $880 billion on the same platform. Both are numbers worth holding lightly, because secondary markets behave very differently from public equities, and the gap between these figures and actual business value is real and significant.
Forge Global and platforms like it are where insiders, people who joined a company early and hold equity, can sell portions of their stakes. When investor demand vastly outstrips available supply, prices detach from underlying fundamentals in ways that would not happen on a public exchange. The $1 trillion figure is not a consensus valuation arrived at through institutional due diligence. It reflects what people without access to Anthropic equity are willing to pay just for the chance to be in.
"Just got offered a $1.05 trillion valuation on my Anthropic shares from a very well-known growth fund," investor Jesse Leimgruber wrote on X this week. "Absolutely wild." Bradley Horowitz, a partner at Wisdom Ventures and an early backer, described the situation more dryly: "We receive daily offers, from the ridiculous to the sublime. It's almost less about the return than being able to say they're an Anthropic investor."
Anthropic's last formal funding round, completed in February 2026, valued the company at $380 billion post-money. That is itself an extraordinary number. The gap between $380 billion and $1 trillion is not a sign that the company doubled in value in three months. It is a sign that secondary market supply is extremely tight and that a lot of money is chasing very few available shares.
What is driving the demand is real, even if the secondary price is partly speculative. Anthropic's annualised revenue reportedly climbed from $9 billion in late 2025 to $39 billion by March 2026, a pace of growth that very few companies of any size have matched. Claude Code has become a serious tool among developers. Partnerships with Amazon and Palantir have deepened. The company is no longer framed as OpenAI's scrappy safety-focused challenger; it is increasingly seen as a genuine competitor for first place in enterprise AI.
OpenAI is preparing its own IPO, potentially targeting a listing in late 2026. Anthropic is widely expected to follow. When they do go public, the process will involve actual disclosure, institutional scrutiny, and price discovery of a different kind. Secondary market valuations tend to compress at IPO rather than expand, as the information asymmetry that inflates private prices gets resolved.
The secondary market frenzy does capture something real, though: the level of conviction that the major private AI players represent a generational opportunity, and the frustration of investors who cannot access them through ordinary channels. "Everybody wants to be part of a generational opportunity in AI," Rainmaker Securities CEO Glen Anderson told Business Insider, "and right now, Anthropic is in the pole position." Whether that position holds, and what it is worth at IPO, is a different question from what a desperate buyer offered on Forge Global this week.