Analysis
What changed: Pulse reported that OpenAI completed a $7 billion employee tender offer this week at an $852 billion valuation. The detail worth pulling out on its own is the comparison buried in that same coverage -- Nasdaq Private Market secondary data now prices Anthropic above $1.1 trillion, a gap of roughly $250 billion over OpenAI's fresh tender price, according to CNBC.
That crossover is new. Anthropic closed its $65 billion Series H round in May at a $965 billion valuation, and secondary trading has pushed that number higher still since. For most of 2025 and early 2026, OpenAI held the larger valuation of the two labs by a wide margin; the two have now essentially swapped positions, with Anthropic's climb accelerating faster than OpenAI's tender price has moved.
“Anthropic closed its $65 billion Series H round in May at a $965 billion valuation, and secondary trading has pushed that number higher still since.”
Neither number is public-market-tested. Secondary valuations move on which buyers show up to a given auction and how much float is available that week, which means both marks are more fragile than a listed company's share price -- a handful of large trades in either direction could shift the gap meaningfully before either company files to go public, a dynamic Benzinga flagged as a live risk to any trillion-dollar IPO timing bet. Still, the direction of travel matters to LPs with private AI exposure through secondary funds: capital appears to be pricing Anthropic's enterprise and safety-forward positioning at a premium right now, relative to OpenAI's larger consumer reach.
The risk in over-reading this: Anthropic's higher mark hasn't been tested by a comparable tender offer of its own recently, and a thin, less-liquid secondary market can produce a headline number that doesn't survive real selling pressure. Whichever lab files first for a public listing will be the actual test of which valuation was closer to durable.
