Anthropic passes OpenAI on paper

In February, Anthropic closed a $30 billion round that valued it at $380 billion. By April, investors were offering to put in $50 billion more at $850-900 billion. Then, on Forge Global — the marketplace where early shareholders trade their stakes — the implied price crossed $1 trillion, edging past OpenAI's roughly $880 billion. The four-year-old lab had never been worth more than its larger rival on any market, even an illiquid private one. The reversal took about three months.

Secondary trades are illiquid, minority positions with no board rights and no path to forced liquidity.

Revenue gives the run a spine: Anthropic's annualized sales went from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to roughly $30 billion by March, pulled up by Claude Code and its developer API. But the trillion-dollar figure is the softest number in the stack. It comes from thin secondary trades — minority stakes with no board seats and no guaranteed way to cash out — and the named source is Forge's own CEO, whose marketplace earns a fee on every trade. There are far more would-be buyers than sellers, and a handful of them moved the price fast.

The clarifying detail sits one layer down. Even as secondaries implied $1 trillion, the analysts pricing Anthropic's actual stock-market debut — it filed confidentially on June 1, targeting late October — put the median listing at around $560 billion, barely half the private-market peak. The people betting on the real number expect the hype to settle when the shares finally have to clear.