Analysis
OpenAI and Anthropic are taking opposite paths this quarter, and their valuations are moving in opposite directions. OpenAI's reported $30 billion round, first reported at a $1.4 trillion pre-money valuation about a month earlier, was revised down to $1.25 trillion as Coatue stepped in to lead alongside new UAE investors -- roughly an 11% markdown from that earlier figure.
Anthropic is moving the other way. Pulse has tracked the earliest backers -- Spark Capital, Iconiq, Menlo Ventures and Coatue among them -- sitting on paper stakes built on a private valuation of $965 billion as of May 2026, while bankers are reportedly floating an IPO valuation as high as $2 trillion, more than double that mark.
“A $1.25 trillion OpenAI mark that holds would still be among the largest private valuations ever struck, markdown or not.”
The divergence matters because both numbers describe the same underlying bet: that frontier AI labs deserve software-company multiples on infrastructure-heavy economics. TechCrunch reported OpenAI's own figure has already moved once since first reported, from $1.4 trillion down to $1.25 trillion, which suggests private-market pricing for mega-rounds is less settled than the headline numbers imply. Anthropic's $2 trillion target, meanwhile, has not been tested by a single day of public trading, and its IPO has already slipped once from its original fall date -- and unlike Anthropic, OpenAI has said it will not go public at all this year, opting for this private raise instead.
Risk cuts both ways here. A $1.25 trillion OpenAI mark that holds would still be among the largest private valuations ever struck, markdown or not. And a $965 billion-to-$2 trillion jump for Anthropic looks aggressive but is in line with the multiple expansion investors have paid for AI infrastructure names all year. What breaks the pattern is a weak debut on Anthropic's actual IPO, or another markdown on OpenAI's private round -- the first real market tests since each private mark was set.