Key Points:
- Institutional investors desperately want to sell $600 million in OpenAI shares but cannot find willing buyers on the secondary market.
- Market makers currently hold $2 billion in cash from buyers who want only to purchase shares in the rival company Anthropic.
- OpenAI recently completed a massive $122 billion fundraising round, pushing its overall valuation to a staggering $852 billion.
- Despite a recent code leak and a major legal battle with the Pentagon, Anthropic commands $1.6 billion in secondary market demand.
Private investors quickly changed their minds about the artificial intelligence race. Buyers on the secondary stock market are now aggressively chasing shares of Anthropic while ignoring its biggest competitor. OpenAI shares recently fell completely out of favor. In many cases, early investors find it almost impossible to unload their stakes in the famous company that created ChatGPT.
Ken Smythe, the founder of Next Round Capital, noticed a massive drop in demand for OpenAI shares on his secondary marketplace. His firm has handled $2.5 billion in total financial transactions over the years. Over the past few weeks, about six different institutional investors approached his company. These hedge funds and venture capital firms wanted to sell roughly $600 million worth of OpenAI shares. Last year, eager buyers would have snatched up those shares in just a few days. Today, Smythe says his team literally cannot find anyone in their pool of hundreds of institutional investors willing to take the deal. Meanwhile, his active buyers have $2 billion in cash ready to deploy exclusively into Anthropic.
A massive gap in corporate valuations drives this sudden shift in investor behavior. OpenAI currently boasts a massive $852 billion valuation. In contrast, Anthropic has a much lower valuation of $380 billion. Adam Crawley, the co-founder of the Augment marketplace, explained that investors rush to grab Anthropic equity before the price shoots higher. Buyers believe Anthropic offers a much better risk-and-reward scenario right now. They bet that the smaller company’s valuation will soon catch up to OpenAI’s. If they buy OpenAI shares at the current peak, they struggle to see how they will make a solid return in the near future.
Other secondary trading platforms see the same trends. Augment and Hiive report record demand for Anthropic shares. Crawley noted that buyers are currently placing massive bids valuing Anthropic at roughly $600 billion. This target represents a massive 50% premium over its previous funding round. Hiive co-founder Prab Rattan added that his platform registered more than $1.6 billion in direct demand for Anthropic shares. Crawley described the current buyer interest as essentially unlimited. On the flip side, Next Round Capital sees incoming bids for OpenAI at a $765 billion valuation, representing a 10% discount from the previous $850 billion mark.
Trading these private shares requires creative financial maneuvers. Neither artificial intelligence company allows early investors to trade shares openly without strict corporate permission. To bypass these rules, sellers use special-purpose vehicles to transfer their financial interests. OpenAI warned the public to exercise extreme caution when dealing with unauthorized brokers offering these complex vehicles. To challenge the expensive broker model, OpenAI established authorized channels through major banks, allowing individuals to participate at zero extra cost.
Banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group now offer OpenAI shares directly to their wealthy clients without charging carry fees. However, Goldman Sachs knows exactly what its clients actually want. The bank still charges its standard carry fee to clients who want to invest in Anthropic. That specific fee often takes a massive 15% to 20% cut of the total profits, yet wealthy buyers still gladly pay it just to get a piece of the company.
This secondary market slump happens right as OpenAI celebrates a major financial victory. Just a few days ago, OpenAI completed its largest primary fundraising round ever. The company secured a staggering $122 billion from major tech giants, venture capital funds, and retail investors. Primary fundraising often looks very different from secondary market sales. During a primary round, existing investors usually buy more shares just to maintain their ownership percentage and keep the founders happy. They then quietly turn around and sell portions of that exposure on the secondary market to reduce their risk.
Some early backers feel nervous about the soaring operating costs at OpenAI. The company is committed to spending billions more than Anthropic on physical infrastructure and computing power over the next few years. While OpenAI built a massive consumer user base, it moves quite slowly when capturing highly lucrative corporate clients. Anthropic dominates that specific higher-margin enterprise market, giving the company a much stronger financial growth trajectory.
Anthropic still faces several major hurdles of its own. The company recently sued the United States Department of Defense. The Pentagon officially designated the technology firm a supply-chain risk and ordered a strict ban on government entities’ use of its software. Additionally, Anthropic suffered its second major security slip-up just a few days ago when engineers inadvertently published the internal source code running its Claude model. Despite these problems, private investors clearly favor Anthropic as the smartest financial bet, with both companies preparing to go public later this year.
