Anthropic has been chased to nearly $1 trillion in the private secondary market, with heat now surpassing OpenAI. Behind Anthropic’s Valuation surge are scarce equity, revenue growth, the product momentum of Claude Code, and capital placing a fresh bet on AI platform entry points.
Over the past few weeks, the hottest company in Silicon Valley’s private secondary market has become Anthropic.
On unlisted equity trading platforms such as Forge Global, Anthropic’s valuation has already approached $1 trillion. Some sellers are quoting even higher, at $1.05 trillion to $1.15 trillion.
By comparison, OpenAI’s valuation on similar platforms is around $880 billion, slightly above its March fundraising valuation of $852 billion this year, but its trading heat has already fallen behind Anthropic.
This change in pricing has first rewritten market sentiment.
Over the past two years, OpenAI has always sat at the very center of the AI world, with the strongest user mindshare, the most complete product spillover effect, and the clearest brand recognition.
Anthropic has long played the role of a high-quality challenger, with strong model capability, a restrained organizational style, and relatively contained commercial moves.
This time, the secondary market gave a new ranking first. Capital has started to see Anthropic as the scarcer chip, with a steeper upward slope.
Anthropic’s Valuation: The Secondary Market Trades Scarcity First, Then Consensus
Supply Shrinks, Prices Jump
Price updates for private companies mainly rely on fundraising rounds and secondary transfers.
The former happens infrequently. The latter reflects short-term supply and demand more easily. This round of Anthropic’s Valuation rise came first from a rapid contraction in supply.
Three months ago, Anthropic’s latest fundraising round was still valued at around $380 billion.
In a short period of time, secondary market quotes have already more than doubled.
For existing shareholders, a rise like this came too fast, so the willingness to keep holding naturally increased.
Many shareholders have recently been receiving acquisition offers frequently, but very few are actually willing to sell.
The shares circulating in the market were limited to begin with. Once sell-side supply shrinks, the price jumps very quickly.
Demand Surges for Scarce AI Assets
The change on the buy side is even more obvious.
Growth funds, family offices, and late-stage institutional investors are all chasing Anthropic. The core reason is simple: top-tier AI assets still have not truly opened to the public market, primary shares are highly closed off, and the secondary market has become one of the few remaining ways to get in.
When a batch of capital chases a very small amount of shares at the same time, the price quickly leaves the usual rhythm and enters a range driven by expectations.
At this stage, the quote no longer only reflects what the company is worth right now. It also reflects a judgment: in the next few years, does Anthropic have the chance to become one of the very few, most certain AI platform companies?
Anthropic’s Valuation Repricing: Driven by Revenue Growth and Claude Code
Revenue Growth Sets the Floor
Anthropic’s popularity is not being pushed by market sentiment alone.
Closer to actual trading logic, it recently delivered two results that are easy for capital to price: one is the speed of revenue growth, and the other is the product extensibility represented by Claude Code.
Revenue growth decides the floor of Anthropic’s Valuation.
Model capability can be caught up with within half a year. A stable commercialization curve is much harder to copy.
Investment firms are more willing to pay for companies with sustained revenue growth, because that means the company has already started turning technical advantage into repeatable, scalable cash flow expectations.
For AI companies today, whoever builds a revenue structure first is more likely to get a higher multiple.
Claude Code Lifts the Ceiling
Claude Code, meanwhile, lifts the valuation ceiling.
Programming is one of the scenarios where AI can most easily turn value into something real. Usage is frequent, and results are also easier to measure.
Developers are willing to pay for efficiency, and enterprises are also willing to pay for stable workflows.
As long as the market believes Anthropic still has room to keep expanding in code generation, agent collaboration, and enterprise development tools, its identity shifts from a model company to an infrastructure company that may occupy the developer entry point.
The capital market is willing to give the latter more room for imagination.
Anthropic’s Valuation vs OpenAI: A Discount from a Higher Starting Point
OpenAI Still Holds the Center
The cooling of OpenAI’s secondary market heat does not mean its fundamentals have reversed.
From brand, distribution, and product coverage, OpenAI is still the center of the industry.
The main issue is that its valuation starting point is too high.
A fundraising valuation of $852 billion has already written the market’s optimism for several years of future growth into the price.
High Expectations Limit Short-Term Upside
To keep paying up at this level, investors need stronger certainty: whether revenue realization is fast enough, whether organizational control is stable enough, and whether the path to profit is clear enough.
Another reason is that OpenAI’s story has already been discussed thoroughly enough by the market.
ChatGPT’s user scale, multimodal layout, enterprise product line, agent direction, and platform ambition are all highly visible.
High visibility brings cognitive dividends, but it also compresses the space for short-term surprise.
For buyers in the secondary market, OpenAI is still a high-quality asset, but it is hard to treat it as a trade that has not yet been fully discovered.
Anthropic is in a different stage.
It has fewer shares available, its narrative is updating faster, and its price is still in a period of rapid repricing.
The secondary market naturally prefers this kind of asset, because the elasticity is larger and sentiment can drive transactions more easily.
Anthropic’s Valuation and Market Dynamics: Forge Global as an Amplifier
Platforms like Forge Global played the role of an amplifier in this round of Anthropic’s Valuation surge.
Pricing in the primary market updates slowly, and often only forms among a small number of institutions.
Secondary platforms gather scattered buyers and sellers together, making every inquiry, listing, and transaction more likely to become a new price anchor.
Once a high quote is widely spread through the market, sellers become even more reluctant to sell, while buyers worry that the next price will be even higher.
The psychology on both sides of supply and demand gets reinforced.
This is also the clearest feature of the private secondary market: prices often move ahead of fundamentals.
Especially when top AI companies generally are not in a hurry to go public, and primary allocations are locked up by long-term capital, the secondary market has absorbed a large amount of allocation demand that previously had nowhere to go.
The fast rise in prices contains some bubble element, but it also has a real basis in supply structure.
Anthropic’s Valuation Signals a Shift in AI Pricing Logic
Anthropic overtaking OpenAI in the secondary market looks on the surface like one equity quote surpassing another, but behind it is a migration in how AI companies are being priced.
Earlier on, the market mainly compared whose model was stronger and who had more users.
Today, investors care more and more about another set of questions: who can enter high-frequency, high-payment, verifiable use cases; who can plug models into stable workflows; who can control developer and enterprise entry points; and who can turn technical leadership into revenue and platform position.
Anthropic is getting higher bids because of Claude Code and revenue growth. OpenAI is being chased more slowly because its valuation is already too full and expectations are already too fully priced in. In fact, both point to the same thing: the value judgment for AI companies is shifting from model rankings to entry-point control and commercial execution.
The secondary market has simply aligned this change with valuation earlier.
