In a blog post on Thursday, Anthropic wrote that it had “raised $65 billion in Series H funding led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, bringing the company’s valuation post-money to $965 billion.” OpenAI’s latest blog post on similar lines puts its valuation at $852 billion.
This means the top of the leaderboard has been flipped. Among AI-first tech companies, Anthropic, “the cloud one,” is now technically more valuable than OpenAI, “the chatgpt one.”
However, there are some factors to keep in mind about these valuations. First of all, As critics like Ed Zitron keenly and consistently point out (as well as more staunch, mainstream critics like HSBC), AI as a core business is – at the very least – unproven as a strategy for long-term profitability. Anthropic claims it only made an operating profit for one quarter, as The Wall Street Journal reported, but that story also said that “It’s not clear what accounting methods Anthropic used to book revenues and costs,” and that, “The company may not be profitable the entire year as it plans to increase expenses due to its vast computing needs.”
So it would be an understatement to call Anthropic a profitable company. The above mentioned “huge computing requirements” are no secret. It has pledged hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade to companies like Amazon, Google and Broadcom, and has made a short-term commitment of $1.5 billion per month to SpaceX.
No doubt investors are aware of all that spending, but they also know that Anthropic’s revenue soared around the start of the 2026 calendar year due to an influx of enterprise customers. Vibe coding is now the clear standard, creating a narrative in which companies no longer need young coders, thanks to cloud code along with competing products like OpenAI’s Codex. Announcements of small changes to Anthropic’s Cloud Code product are beginning to have a huge impact on the stock market, especially the valuations of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.
Recently, instead of leading, OpenAI is being seen 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 Anthropic’s funding round from two months earlier. So this is somewhat similar to when a sports team overtakes its opponent in the league rankings by playing more than one game. There are still more balls to come.
Since OpenAI and Anthropic – for now – are both privately held companies, price research is scattered and a bit vague, especially since the companies are still not required to publicly report their earnings and expenses. As for its value, Anthropic’s valuation on Forge Global, a secondary market for private stocks, overtook OpenAI last month, with Anthropic valued at nearly $1 trillion and OpenAI at $880 billion.
Do you want an even sketchier estimate? At the time of writing Polymarket valued Anthropic at 89% at the end of June with a probability of exceeding OpenAI.
Perhaps some degree of clarity is about to come. A May 20 New York Times article, citing “two people with knowledge of the matter” said that OpenAI is expected to file for an IPO “in the coming weeks.” In fact, it may be filed confidentially on May 22. Meanwhile, Forbes says Anthropic’s IPO could come “by October.”
So perhaps there will be a clear winner in this competition in the autumn. Until then, the pricing of shares in OpenAI and Anthropic will be publicly available in real time. If people dispute whether one publicly traded AI company is “more valuable” than another, they can fire up an app like Robinhood and vote with their life savings. And then, well, God help them.
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