On a private-share marketplace called Forge Global, a single number flashed across trader screens this week: approximately $1 trillion. That was the implied valuation buyers were willing to pay for shares in Anthropic, the maker of Claude.
It was not a primary funding round. Anthropic did not issue new stock. Nobody wired money to the company. The number came from secondary trading, where existing investors and early employees sell their shares to other buyers. And at Anthropic, there were many buyers and almost no sellers.
Kelly Rodriques, the chief executive of Forge Global, described the level as "hovering around the $1 trillion mark."
On the same platform, OpenAI trades at roughly $880 billion. Three months ago, in the largest private financing deal in Silicon Valley history, OpenAI priced a primary round at 852 billion dollars and raised 122 billion dollars of committed capital.
In other words, the most discussed AI company in the world is now trading on secondary markets at roughly 3% above its own primary price. Anthropic, the quieter rival, is trading at 2.6 times its most recent primary price.
How Anthropic Got Here in Three Months
In February 2026, Anthropic closed a Series G funding round led by GIC and Coatue. The round totaled 30 billion dollars of committed capital. The post-money valuation came in at $380 billion. That was the primary market's verdict on what the company was worth.
Three months later, the secondary market's verdict is a different story entirely.
| Company | Primary Valuation (Latest Round) | Secondary Market (Forge Global) | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | $380 billion (Feb 2026 Series G) | ~$1 trillion | 2.6x |
| OpenAI | $852 billion (Mar 2026) | ~$880 billion | 1.03x |
The gap is not a rounding error. It reflects a structural shift in how the private market is pricing two companies that, twelve months ago, were treated as roughly comparable.
The mechanism driving the secondary price is simple: many people want to buy Anthropic shares, employees and early investors have had few chances to sell, and buyers are bidding aggressively to get in. The mechanism is also dangerous. Secondary prices reflect whatever a single motivated buyer will pay for illiquid, minority shares with no board rights, no guarantee of liquidity, and no ability to force a sale or IPO. A $1 trillion secondary print is not a company valuation in the Wall Street sense. It is a statement of demand.
Still, the specific bids surfacing on private marketplaces are remarkable.
The Bids Nobody Expected
Glen Anderson, the chief executive of Rainmaker Securities, a platform that facilitates secondary transactions in private companies, told reporters he had personally witnessed a bid for Anthropic shares at a $960 billion valuation. The shares transferred to another buyer before he could place a client.
Ken Sawyer, the cofounder and managing partner at Saints Capital, reported that a shareholder had listed Anthropic shares at a $1.15 trillion valuation.
Jesse Leimgruber, founder of an AI startup called OpenHome, said on X that a "very well-known growth fund" had bid $1.05 trillion for shares.
One investor, according to reporting compiled by Tom's Hardware, offered a 14-acre estate in exchange for Anthropic shares valued north of $800 billion.
The psychology driving these offers is not purely financial. Anderson described it plainly: "It's almost less about the return than being able to say they're an Anthropic investor."
He also summarized the broader mood: "It's been an epic run for Anthropic. Everybody wants to be part of a generational opportunity in AI, and right now, Anthropic is in the pole position."
Not every investor is playing. Bradley Horowitz, a general partner at a fund that was an early backer of both Anthropic and OpenAI, told Business Insider: "We receive daily offers from the ridiculous to the sublime. I barely open those emails because we're not interested. We are playing a long game."
What Changed Since February
The answer is revenue. Specifically, enterprise revenue from one product.
Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate was roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. By March 2026, that figure had surged to approximately 30 billion dollars. That is a 233% increase in a single quarter, a pace almost unheard of at this scale.
For comparison, LDS covered the first leg of this surge in late March, when the number was 19 billion dollars and bankers were already penciling in a 60 billion dollar IPO for October.
The primary driver is Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic coding tool, which now generates roughly $2.5 billion in annualized revenue on its own. Claude Code reached that number within about six months of launch, a developer-tool adoption curve most comparable to the early days of GitHub Copilot except steeper.
Enterprise adoption has been the real story. Claude is being rolled out across engineering and data teams at large organizations at a pace that is translating into multi-year, multi-million-dollar contracts. Paid Claude subscriptions roughly doubled in 2026. Monthly visits to claude.ai climbed from 16 million in January 2025 to 220 million in January 2026.
Secondary buyers are pricing forward. If Anthropic's revenue keeps compounding at anything close to its recent rate, and if the October 2026 IPO window holds, a $1 trillion secondary print looks less delusional and more like an aggressive forward multiple on a company that is printing enterprise contracts.
OpenAI Is Showing the Opposite Signal
On the same secondary platforms where Anthropic is being bid up, OpenAI shares are moving at a trickle. Anderson described investor interest there this year as "tepid."
OpenAI's most recent primary round closed March 31, 2026. It valued the company at $852 billion and raised 122 billion dollars, the largest private financing in Silicon Valley history.
By conventional logic, a company whose primary round closed at 852 billion dollars six weeks ago should be seeing intense secondary demand. Instead, the premium is about 3%.
There are specific reasons. OpenAI's investor base has been openly debating whether the $852 billion number is defensible given the company's costs, the Microsoft relationship, and the Pentagon controversy that drove an exodus of users to Anthropic. LDS covered that user migration in depth. The company's recent IPO risk disclosures to investors, which leaked earlier this year, flagged its dependency on Microsoft as a potential business-killer.
Anthropic, by contrast, has had its own Pentagon drama but has emerged commercially unscathed. Its revenue is roughly 80% enterprise and expanding without government contracts carrying the weight.
The Counterargument: Froth, Not Fundamentals
Not everyone is buying the narrative that Anthropic is truly worth $1 trillion. Several analysts and secondary-market participants have flagged the same warning signs they saw in late-stage private valuations before previous tech corrections.
The first concern is mechanical. A secondary print of $1 trillion requires only one motivated buyer willing to pay that price for a small block of shares. There is no requirement that the price clear the full cap table, no discount for illiquidity, and no pricing discipline from underwriters. Primary rounds involve negotiated valuations with sophisticated investors performing diligence. Secondary trades involve whoever is bidding today.
The second concern is the source of demand. Anderson's own observation, that buyers care more about being "an Anthropic investor" than the return, describes investor psychology during bubbles. When status drives the bid, price discovery breaks.
The third concern is sustainability. Anthropic's revenue growth is real, but Claude Code is one product, launched recently, in a market where OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and well-funded startups are all trying to take share. The 233% quarterly growth rate is not a run rate. It is a moment. If enterprise contracts compress from per-seat pricing to usage pricing, or if a competitor releases a materially better coding product, the trajectory changes quickly.
Bradley Horowitz, declining to sell at sublime offers, put the skeptical view in a sentence: the game is long, and prices today are not the same as realized outcomes.
The Bottom Line
The story in the numbers is deceptively simple. In February, Anthropic was worth $380 billion by the verdict of GIC and Coatue. In April, it is being traded on private platforms at roughly one trillion dollars.
What changed in the interim was not the company's cap table, its board, or its fundamental technology. What changed was that the market watched Claude Code post its first full quarter of enterprise revenue, saw annualized sales jump from 9 billion to 30 billion dollars, and repriced the company accordingly.
Whether that reprice holds through the company's next primary round, through an IPO window that bankers are targeting for October 2026, or through the next competitive cycle, is the question every investor reading this has to answer for themselves. The secondary market is telling one story. The public market, when it finally opens, will tell another.
Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI commented on the secondary valuations.
As one Anthropic investor told Rainmaker's Anderson, when asked why people were bidding the way they were: it was less about the return, and more about being in the room.
Sources
- Anthropic hits a trillion-dollar valuation on secondary markets and knocks OpenAI from the top spot — Startup Fortune, April 23, 2026
- Anthropic overtakes OpenAI with $1T secondary market valuation after 233% revenue surge — TechFunding News, April 23, 2026
- Anthropic reportedly hits $1 trillion implied valuation on secondary markets — The Next Web, April 23, 2026
- Anthropic surpasses biggest rival OpenAI in secondary market valuation — Tom's Hardware, April 23, 2026
- Anthropic reaches $1 trillion valuation on secondary markets — Yahoo Finance / Business Insider, April 23, 2026
- Anthropic Eclipses OpenAI in Secondary Market as Valuation Hits $1 Trillion Milestone — TradingKey, April 23, 2026
- OpenAI Valued at $852 Billion After Completing $122 Billion Round — Bloomberg, March 31, 2026
- OpenAI closes funding round at an $852 billion valuation — CNBC, March 31, 2026
- Anthropic Nears $20 Billion Revenue Run Rate Amid Pentagon Feud — Bloomberg, March 3, 2026