Anthropic is now worth 1.2 trillion dollars, at least on the private secondary market where its shares quietly change hands, and the more telling detail is how few of those shares anyone can actually get. "Anthropic is the most sought-after company the venture secondary market has ever seen," said Javier Avalos, chief executive of the trading platform Caplight, where the AI lab is valued higher than ever and willing sellers are almost nowhere to be found.
The number is moving fast. It was less than three months ago that Anthropic crossed 1 trillion dollars and overtook OpenAI, which now trades around 908 billion on the same market. Anthropic's valuation is up 550 percent year over year. Because neither company has gone public, most investors can only buy through secondary deals, and with the stock climbing, existing holders are reluctant to part with anything. The result is a thin, frantic market full of special-purpose vehicles that Anthropic openly opposes, byzantine ownership chains, and would-be buyers offering to sell their homes for a sliver of equity. Anthropic's own website now warns that if someone offers you a way in, "assume that it is invalid."
Behind the secondary-market mania is a real race to the public markets. Both Anthropic and OpenAI filed IPO paperwork in June and are eyeing debuts this fall, each chasing a valuation near 1 trillion dollars. Whoever goes first will likely set the tone for the other: a blockbuster debut lifts the second, a weak one drags it down or delays it. Anthropic looks like the faster grower, with an estimated 47 billion dollars in annualized revenue, roughly double OpenAI's, and about 80 percent of it coming from enterprises rather than consumers.
The two are approaching the starting line with opposite political postures, and it shows. OpenAI has reportedly floated selling 5 percent of itself to the US government, and Sam Altman has assiduously courted the Trump administration. Anthropic has done the reverse. The Pentagon branded it a "supply chain risk" after it refused certain contract terms, and in June the Commerce Department briefly imposed export controls on its newest models. A valuation this dependent on continued goodwill could swing hard on any sudden conflict with Washington.
Each company carries a different investor worry. OpenAI's is its staggering cash burn; it recently lost around 1.22 dollars for every dollar it earned, and could stay unprofitable well past 2030 if inference costs do not fall. Anthropic's is simply its price. A 1.2 trillion dollar valuation demands not just fast growth but sustained cost discipline, and it leans on a delicate balance between its two large backers, Amazon and Google. A broad cooling toward speculative AI listings would hit it hardest.
The open question hanging over both is why they are in such a hurry. One reading of the rush to go public is confidence, that these are generational businesses eager to let the public share in the upside. Another, less flattering, is that private capital may finally be tiring of funding companies that burn billions a year, and the IPO is less a victory lap than a search for the next, larger pool of money. The secondary market's frenzy suggests plenty of investors still believe the first story. The coming months will test it.