In a blog post on Thursday, Anthropic wrote that it “has raised $65 billion in Series H funding led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.” The most recent blog post along similar lines from OpenAI places its valuation at $852 billion.
That means the top of the leaderboard has flipped. Among AI-first tech companies, Anthropic, “the Claude one,” is now technically more valuable than OpenAI, “the ChatGPT one.”
There are, however, some mitigating factors to keep in mind about these valuations. First of all, as critics like Ed Zitron avidly and constantly point out (as well as more staid, mainstream critics like HSBC), AI as a core business is—to say the leas—unproven as a strategy for long-term profitability. Anthropic claims to have just turned an operating profit for one quarter, as the Wall Street Journal reported, but that story also notes that “it is unclear what accounting methods Anthropic has used to book revenue and costs,” and that, “The company might not remain profitable for the full year as it plans spending increases due to its vast computing needs.“
So it would be a stretch to call Anthropic a profitable company. Those aforementioned “vast computing needs” are no secret. It has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to companies like Amazon, Google, and Broadcom over the next decade, and it’s made a short term commitment of $1.5 billion per month to SpaceX.
Investors are no doubt aware of all that spending, but they also know Anthropic’s revenue exploded around the start of the 2026 calendar year because of an influx of enterprise clients. Vibe coding is the apparent norm now, creating a narrative in which companies supposedly no longer need young coders to do menial work thanks to Claude Code—along with competitor products like OpenAI’s Codex. Announcements of small changes to Anthropic’s Claude Code product have started to have huge impacts on the stock market, particularly the valuations of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.
Rather than leading lately, OpenAI is seen 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 calculated based on a funding round from two months before Anthropic’s. So this is a little like when a sports team overtakes a rival in league rankings having played one more game than the other. There’s more ball still to come.
Since OpenAI and Anthropic are—for now—both privately held companies, price discovery is scattered and a bit sketchy, especially since the companies still don’t have to report their earnings and expenditures publicly. For what it’s worth, Anthropic’s valuation on Forge Global, a secondary market for private shares overtook OpenAI’s last month, with Anthropic’s estimated value at around $1 trillion, and OpenAI’s at $880 billion.
Want an even sketchier estimate? Polymarket places the odds of Anthropic having a higher valuation than OpenAI at the end of June at 89% as of this writing.
Some degree of clarity is probably on its way. A May 20 New York Times article citing “two people with knowledge of the matter“ said OpenAI was expected to file for an IPO “in the coming weeks.” In fact, it may have filed confidentially on May 22. Meanwhile, Forbes says Anthropic’s IPO could come “as soon as October.”
So perhaps in fall there’ll be a clearer winner in this contest. By then, the pricing of shares in OpenAI and Anthropic will be publicly available in real time. If people dispute that one publicly traded AI company is “worth more” than the other, they can, and probably will, fire up an app like Robinhood and vote with their life savings. And then, well, God help them.
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