Anthropic's valuation doubled to $80 billion in two months, approaching that of OpenAI! Enterprise-level AI is reshaping capital flows.

According to informed sources, Anthropic has recently attracted strong interest from multiple venture capital firms, pushing its potential funding valuation to a staggering $800 billion. This number not only doubled the financing valuation of $380 billion two months ago but also directly challenged the industry leader OpenAI's previous established valuation benchmark of $852 billion. Market rumors indicate that although Anthropic officials are currently maintaining a restrained attitude towards a new round of financing, its strong performance in the secondary market and its financial myth of annual revenue surging from $90 billion to $300 billion have made it a more valuable "new favorite" in investors' eyes, sparking a trend of funds withdrawing from OpenAI shares and transferring to Anthropic for arbitrage. It is understood that negotiations between Anthropic and investors are still in the early stages, and the deal may not be reached or terms may change. Related parties are required to remain anonymous due to confidentiality requirements. According to one informed source, although Anthropic does not rule out the possibility of raising new funds in the coming months, it is currently unclear whether the company will accept investor conditions or complete financing at a valuation of $800 billion. Additionally, the company has discussed initiating a public listing plan as early as October. Ecological Construction: Enterprise Market Platform War Heating Up However, the valuation frenzy surrounding Anthropic is somewhat built on the basis of bleeding in the traditional tech industry. The model named Claude Mythos and its accompanying automated tools recently showcased by Anthropic have been interpreted by the market as the "ultimate substitute" for traditional software processes due to their high level of autonomous execution capabilities. This panic quickly spread from the stock market to the deep financial markets. As AI agents demonstrated the ability to erode the competitive advantages of software companies that rely on stable subscription revenues over the past decade, credit investors began to massively sell off software bonds. At the same time, OpenAI's market position is showing cracks due to this competition. Despite maintaining a high valuation of $852 billion, the company's internal strategic direction is being questioned by core investors. In order to defend against Anthropic's rapid expansion in the lucrative enterprise market, OpenAI has urgently shifted its strategic focus to leverage its large user base to counterattack on the enterprise side. However, this transformation has met strong dissatisfaction from its core investors, who believe that this "tactical swing" exposes OpenAI's strategic anxiety in the face of Anthropic's revenue explosion and may dilute its resources in developing General Artificial Intelligence (AGI). The competition between the two giants has extended to the enterprise market ecological construction. Anthropic has introduced "organizational control features" to enhance the deployment of Claude Cowork, adding role-based access control, team spending limits, and OpenTelemetry support to enhance enterprise cost predictability and operational observability, while strengthening MCP connector control. On the other hand, OpenAI has opted for a pricing strategy, cutting the Codex Pro subscription price in half from the original flagship plan to $100 per month, with usage increased fivefold, designed for high-intensity programmers, and offering an experimental preview feature of GPT-5.4 Pro. These differences in technical strategies reflect the strategic shift of leading vendors in competing for enterprise customers - where model performance alone is no longer enough to win, practicality and ecosystem integration capabilities become key. Market Response: Secondary Market Positioning Reflects Long-term Value Judgement Divide The valuation game is particularly evident in the secondary market. OpenAI's shares are slow-selling in the resale market, with Next Round Capital data showing that multiple transactions worth around $600 million of OpenAI stock are seeking buyers, whereas these types of transactions were often sold out weeks ago. In contrast, there is strong demand for Anthropic shares among investors, with Goldman Sachs continuing to charge a standard 15%-20% performance fee for clients interested in investing in Anthropic, while bids for OpenAI shares in the secondary market correspond to a valuation of approximately $765 billion, a discount of 10% from the latest funding valuation. The Augment platform has received bids for Anthropic shares valued at $600 billion, a 58% increase over its previous financing valuation. Investors generally believe that Anthropic's dominant position in the enterprise market makes its growth trajectory stronger, while OpenAI, despite having a large consumer base, is lagging in the competition for enterprise customers. With both of the aforementioned giants rumored to launch IPOs as early as October 2026, the market pricing logic has fundamentally shifted. The battle for the pricing power at the $800 billion level is essentially a global investors' ultimate bet on "who can define the next generation of enterprise operating system." Anthropic is accelerating the narrowing of the gap in market share with OpenAI in the enterprise market through supplementary computing power (signing agreements with Google and Broadcom for several gigawatts of TPU computing power) and scenario expansion (commercialization of enterprise knowledge bases, customer service, compliance, and other scenarios). Institutional data shows that OpenAI's market share has dropped to 35.2%, with a gap of only 4.6 percentage points with Anthropic. At the current rate, Anthropic is expected to surpass OpenAI in the next two months. While OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer Drayser criticized Anthropic in a memorandum for building its story on fear and elite control concepts and accused it of misreporting annual revenue, the market is more focused on Anthropic's rapid user expansion in non-engineering departments (such as marketing, finance, legal) and the potential of a closed-loop ecosystem built through organizational control features. In this platform war, OpenAI is attempting to build an ecosystem through the integration of model layers, platform layers, cloud channels, and implementation services. However, Anthropic is effectively suppressing this effort due to its speed of scenario expansion and structural advantage in computation power. The dynamics of secondary market trading and changing investor preferences have clearly outlined the divide in the market's long-term value judgment between Anthropic's valuation catching-up narrative and OpenAI's uncertainty in short-term returns, reshaping the competition landscape and capital flow of the global AI industry.