Something is very wrong when you can't give away shares in the world's hottest AI company. About a half-dozen institutional investors recently tried to sell roughly $600 million in OpenAI shares through secondary marketplace Next Round Capital. They couldn't find a single buyer. Ken Smythe, Next Round's founder, didn't mince words: 'We literally couldn't find anyone in our pool of hundreds of institutional investors to take these shares.' Last year, those shares would have been snatched up within days.
The money is flowing the other direction now. Bids on secondary markets value Claude at roughly $600 billion, up more than 50% from its previous $380 billion valuation. Smythe says buyers have $2 billion ready to deploy into Anthropic. Adam Crawley, co-founder of secondary platform Augment, puts it simply: 'It's just better risk-reward right now.' Investors are betting Anthropic's valuation will catch up to OpenAI's $852 billion mark, and they want in before it does.
Why the flip? OpenAI committed to massive infrastructure spending and built its business around consumers. Anthropic went after enterprise clients from the start, the segment that actually pays and pays well. That higher-margin focus makes Anthropic's growth trajectory look cleaner to investors who've watched OpenAI's operating costs climb. None of this helps OpenAI's plans to go public. Market observers put it bluntly: 'The market is smelling a stinker.'