'Total wild card': Anthropic's OTC valuation soars to $1 trillion - higher than OpenAI's

The value of startup Anthropic on the OTC market has reached the astronomical $1 trillion mark, with chatbot developer Claude leaving behind its main competitor, OpenAI. Dumbfounded brokers are calling what's happening a "complete game-changer," stressing that investors are now driven by fear of missing out on the deal of the decade, not financial math.

Anthropic's valuation is now hovering around the $1 trillion mark on Forge Global, one of the leading trading platforms for non-public company stocks, its CEO Kelly Rodriguez told Business Insider (BI). Just two months ago, the startup was valued at $380 billion, while OpenAI's valuation on the same platform is $880 billion - just 3% higher than the March investment round that valued the ChatGPT developer at $852 billion.

Anthropic and OpenAI are not yet public companies, so investors have to buy their securities from early shareholders and current or former employees. One of Anthropic's security holders recently expressed a willingness to dump his stake based on the company's $1.15 trillion valuation, Ken Sawyer, co-founder of venture capital firm Saints Capital, who specializes in buying stakes from co-owners, told BI.

One "very prominent growth fund" has offered to buy Anthropic shares based on a $1.05 trillion valuation, Jesse Leimgruber, founder of AI startup OpenHome and owner of Anthropic shares, wrote on social media X this week. "Total bullshit," Leimgruber marveled.

"Everyone wants to grab an investment opportunity in AI - one that comes along once in a generation. And right now Anthropic is in pole position (has the best chance of becoming a leader. - Oninvest)," Glen Anderson, head of Rainmaker Securities, who is involved in non-public company securities deals, told BI. According to Anderson, he has just been offered to buy Anthropic shares at the startup's valuation of $960 billion. A month ago, such an amount was considered unthinkable, but now the securities can be taken over by competitors in a matter of hours, the top manager said.

Anthropic shareholders complain that they are literally besieged with inquiries about the possible sale of their stake. "Every day we get offers ranging from ridiculous to exorbitant," said Wisdom Ventures general partner Bradley Horowitz, who invested in both Anthropic and OpenAI during their formative stages. "I hardly ever open those emails because we're not interested. We are playing for keeps," the expert emphasized.

Much of the demand is driven more by lost-margin-of-ownership (FOMO) syndrome than market fundamentals: investors from venture capital firms and family offices feel they need to own Anthropic stock regardless of the price, according to Rainmaker Securities' Anderson. "It's almost not so much about yield anymore, it's about being able to say they are an Anthropic investor - and that's driving up the price," Anderson stated.

The frenzied demand for Anthropic's securities is due to the rapid growth of revenues and the successful launch of the company's corporate products, including the AI assistant for programmers Claude Code. As Bloomberg and BI noted earlier in April, Anthropic's new tools are in high demand among B2B customers, allowing the company to squeeze OpenAI in the business solutions market.

Against the backdrop of the competitor's success, interest in the shares of the creator of ChatGPT is falling rapidly. According to the analytical platform Caplight, in the first quarter of 2026, the number of requests to sell OpenAI securities five times exceeded the number of offers to buy. This statistic records a dramatic change in market sentiment: as early as the end of 2025, buyers of OpenAI shares on the OTC market were confidently dominating sellers.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor