a Thursday’s blog post“Altimeter Capital raised $65 billion in Series H funding led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $965 billion,” Anthropic wrote. A recent blog post from OpenAI along similar lines It is valued at 852 billion dollars.
This means that the top of the leaderboard has changed. Among the first AI-based tech companies, Anthropic, which is “Claude”, is now technically more valuable than OpenAI, which is “ChatGPT”.
However, there are some mitigating factors to consider in these assessments. First of all, Like critics like Ed Zitron enthusiastically and constantly emphasizes (as well as More stable, mainstream critics like HSBC), AI as a core business is unproven as a long-term profitable strategy, i.e. leased. Anthropic claims that only a quarter has made an operating profit, The Wall Street Journal reported on thishowever, the story also notes that “It’s unclear what accounting methods Anthropic uses to record revenue and expenses” and that “The company may not remain profitable for the full year as it plans to increase spending due to its extensive computing needs.”
Thus, it would be difficult to call Anthropic a profitable company. The aforementioned “extensive computing needs” are no secret. This commitment has been made hundreds of billions of dollars Companies like Amazon, Google and Broadcom have committed to the next decade and the short term. 1.5 billion dollars per month to SpaceX.
Investors are certainly aware of all these costs, but they also know Anthropic’s revenue. It exploded at the beginning of the calendar year 2026 due to the influx of corporate clients. Vibe coding is now the visible norm and creates a narrative that companies assume there is no need for young coders anymore Doing the dirty work thanks to Claude Code, along with competing products like OpenAI’s Codex. Announcements of minor changes to Anthropic’s Claude Code product has begun to have a great impact on the stock market, in particular evaluations of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.
Lately, rather than leading OpenAI appears to be playing catch-up.
However, another thing to keep in mind about Anthropic being the new valuation champion is that OpenAI’s most recent valuation was based on a funding round two months before Anthropic. So it’s like one sports team playing more games than another to outdo its opponent in the league standings. More balls ahead.
Since OpenAI and Anthropic are — for now — both private companies, price discoveries are scattered and a bit dated, especially since the companies still don’t have to publicly report their earnings and costs. For what it’s worth, Anthropic valuation on Forge Global, a secondary market for private equity Anthropic surpassed OpenAI last month with an estimated value of nearly $1 trillion, and OpenAI at $880 billion.
Want an even more sketchy guess? Places Polymarket Anthropic has a higher valuation probability than OpenAI 89% of this post at the end of June.
Perhaps some degree of clarity is on its way. May 20 New York Times article Citing “two people with knowledge of the matter,” he said OpenAI would file for an IPO “in the coming weeks.” Actually, it might be It was submitted confidentially on May 22. Meanwhile, Forbes he says Anthropic’s IPO could come “in October.”
So maybe there will be a clearer winner in this competition in the fall. Until then, stock prices in OpenAI and Anthropic will be publicly available in real-time. If people argue that one publicly traded AI company is “more valuable” than another, they’re Robinhood and they vote with their life savings. And then, may God help them.
