Insiders are claiming that OpenAI may soon receive a funding round valuing it at $1.2 trillion, according to the Financial Times. The intriguingly timed round could give OpenAI a higher valuation than its rival Anthropic once again, though it could also come around the same time as Anthropic’s IPO.
The decision to give OpenAI this capital injection “will hinge on exactly when OpenAI decides to go public,” the Financial Times writes. In an interview published in Fortune this past weekend, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company would not go public in 2026. Altman cited safety concerns as a cause, saying his company has “a lot of stuff to do” as it tackles model alignment, and that sorting out such nagging issues is easier as a private company.
OpenAI declined to comment to the Financial Times.
OpenAI was once the clear leader in frontier AI. The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 made AI the focus of the tech industry. But Anthropic’s valuation surged past OpenAI’s over the past year, as business and productivity became the focus of the frontier AI companies, as opposed to scrapped projects like OpenAI’s video generator Sora.
Viewed as a horserace measured in dollar amounts, the OpenAI-Anthropic rivalry breaks down like this:
- Toward the beginning of last year, OpenAI was way, way ahead. March funding rounds valued OpenAI at $300 billion and Anthropic at $61.5 billion.
- In September of last year, another money injection came along, placing Anthropic at $183 billion. The next month, an OpenAI funding round gave it a proportionally less dramatic valuation spike to $500 billion—though it kept its authoritative lead.
- In February of this year—notably after the rise of the agentic platform OpenClaw—Anthropic stepped on the gas, getting itself valued at $380 billion. The following month, upon receiving an astonishing commitment of $122 billion, OpenAI’s valuation ascended to $852 billion.
- But then in May, Anthropic exploded past OpenAI with a funding round valuing it at $965 billion.
So if OpenAI’s rumored funding round succeeds, and values the company at $1.2 trillion, it might—perhaps only briefly—retake the top spot.
I say “briefly” because anonymously sourced reports on Anthropic’s IPO say that investors are targeting a $2 billion valuation once it’s a public company. According to anonymous insiders who spoke to Reuters, the IPO is expected in the middle of next month.
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