Written by: Dong Jing

In just one year, the power balance in the AI ​​industry has quietly shifted. OpenAI, which once held sway in the investment world, is now facing a comprehensive challenge from Anthropic— from market share to secondary market valuation, from reputation in the venture capital community to public opinion on social media platforms, Anthropic is eroding OpenAI's leading position in almost every dimension.

This shift in sentiment was amplified to its extreme at the HumanX AI conference in San Francisco last week. According to Business Insider, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in attendance almost unanimously agreed: Anthropic is the new darling of Silicon Valley.

Roseanne Winsek of Renegade Partners stated bluntly, " Last year in Las Vegas, OpenAI seemed to be the clear winner, but now Anthropic appears to be several steps ahead ." At the same time, Anthropic announced that its annualized recurring revenue (ARR) has surpassed $30 billion, exceeding OpenAI's previously announced $25 billion, making it the world's highest-grossing AI unicorn.

The flow of market funds speaks volumes. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic's valuation on the secondary market has surpassed OpenAI's. Data circulating on social media shows that Anthropic's private market valuation is approximately $863.6 billion, while OpenAI's is approximately $846.1 billion. Furthermore, OpenAI's existing shares are experiencing unprecedented sluggishness in the secondary market, while buyers are lining up to purchase Anthropic shares.

Silicon Valley's winds shift dramatically: Anthropic becomes the main focus of the conference.

This year's HumanX conference was twice the size of last year's, with approximately 6,700 attendees paying over $4,000 for a single ticket. However, in stark contrast to last year's atmosphere in Las Vegas casinos where everyone was betting on OpenAI, Anthropic was the center of attention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this year.

Jared Quincy Davis, founder and CEO of the AI ​​cloud platform Mithril, said

"They (Anthropic) are gaining momentum. It's clear they're focusing on the enterprise market, cutting-edge capabilities, and code generation, while deliberately avoiding certain consumer scenarios—these are the right decisions."

Midway through the conference, Anthropic unveiled its latest model, Mythos, stating that its capabilities are so powerful that it will not be publicly available for the time being due to cybersecurity risks, but will only be accessible to a select group of companies through a new initiative called "Project Glasswing." Tomasz Tunguz, founder and general partner of Theory Ventures, commented, " The Mythos model is significant, and there is tremendous excitement in the market ."

In contrast, OpenAI had virtually no public supporters at the conference. Attendees' criticisms of OpenAI centered on two main points: the perplexing acquisition of the internet talk show TBPN, and the controversy surrounding CEO Altman's deal with the Pentagon. Former Coatue and Kleiner Perkins partner Andy Chen stated, "A considerable number of people disagree with Altman and his actions," and predicted a talent drain at OpenAI.

Secondary Market: Unsold Existing Shares and Valuation Reversal

The signals from the capital markets are even more direct. According to an article on Wall Street News , citing Bloomberg, in early April this year, six OpenAI institutional shareholders—including hedge funds and well-known venture capital firms—attempted to sell approximately $600 million worth of OpenAI shares through the secondary market platform Next Round Capital. However, despite contacting hundreds of institutional buyers, none of them took over the sale.

Next Round Capital founder Ken Smythe stated bluntly, "We simply cannot find any institutional investors willing to take over these shares; we have hundreds of institutional resources." He also revealed that buyers told him they had $2 billion in cash on hand, just waiting to buy Anthropic's stock.

This scenario is playing out on other trading platforms as well. On SPV trading platforms like Augment and Hiive, the trend of investors favoring Anthropic while ignoring OpenAI is quite evident. Augment co-founder Adam Crawley stated that everyone believes Anthropic's valuation can catch up with OpenAI, and therefore everyone wants to buy in as soon as possible.

Valuation data corroborates this assessment. Reports indicate that OpenAI's stock is valued at approximately $765 billion in secondary market trading, a discount of about 10% compared to its previous funding round valuation; while Anthropic's secondary market valuation has reached $600 billion, a premium of over 50% over its previous funding round. Recent data circulating on social media platforms suggests that Anthropic's private market valuation has slightly surpassed OpenAI's.

The actions of Wall Street investment banks are equally intriguing. Reports indicate that several investment banks, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, have begun selling OpenAI stock to high-net-worth clients without charging a share of the profits; while Goldman Sachs continues to charge its clients investing in Anthropic a 15% to 20% profit share as usual.

B2B Market: Anthropic has established an overwhelming advantage.

Behind the revenue figures, deeper structural changes are taking place in the enterprise market.

In the most important B2B sector of current AI large-scale models—code generation—Anthropic's Claude model has captured 42% to 54% of the global market share, while OpenAI only holds 21%. In the enterprise agent market, Anthropic has a 40% share, while OpenAI has 27%.

Incremental data better illustrates the trend. Ramp data shows that among companies that newly purchased AI services in March 2026, a staggering 65% chose Anthropic, while only 32% chose OpenAI. By April 2026, Anthropic already had over 1,000 enterprise customers with annual spending exceeding $1 million, doubling in the past two months, with API calls and customized enterprise services accounting for over 80% of its total revenue.

The cost-efficiency gap is equally staggering. The Wall Street Journal estimates that OpenAI's annual training costs will reach $125 billion by 2030, while Anthropic's will only be around $30 billion—more than four times the cost. With its rapidly growing revenue, Anthropic may achieve positive cash flow by 2027, while OpenAI's profitability timeline remains uncertain.

In contrast, OpenAI's only area where it maintains an overwhelming advantage is the consumer market—ChatGPT currently boasts over 900 million weekly active users, but more than 98% of them are free users, consuming a huge amount of computing power yet generating almost no revenue. In February 2026, OpenAI attempted to introduce advertising into ChatGPT, sparking widespread controversy.

On a social media platform, user @deedy posted that OpenAI/ChatGPT has now started running paid ads on Claude-related keywords , and lamented that "what goes around comes around." The post quickly gained a lot of attention.

OpenAI's Counterattack: Computational Advantage and Leaked Memos

In response to external scrutiny, OpenAI sent a confidential memo to its shareholders this week, which was subsequently leaked. In the memo, OpenAI identified Anthropic as its biggest competitive threat while emphasizing its leading advantage in computing infrastructure.

According to the memo, OpenAI has 1.9 gigawatts (GW) of computing capacity in 2025, which is expected to increase to the low double digits next year and reach approximately 30 GW by 2030. In contrast, OpenAI estimates that Anthropic will only have 1.4 GW by the end of 2025, and is expected to reach 7 to 8 GW next year . "Even by the highest estimate, our expansion rate is substantially ahead and the gap continues to widen," the memo states.

Anthropic has reached an agreement with Google and Broadcom to receive 5GW of next-generation TPU computing power starting in 2027.

However, the very leak of this memo has already revealed OpenAI's defensive posture to some extent. The fact that a company once considered the absolute industry leader now needs to write a separate memo to shareholders explaining why it remains competitive is a telling sign in itself.

This competition is far from over.

Despite Anthropic's strong momentum, several attendees cautioned against jumping to conclusions. "Things are changing too fast," said Roseanne Winsek. "OpenAI could make a comeback." Tomasz Tunguz also noted, "Every day you wake up, something has substantially changed."

OpenAI's fundraising capabilities remain strong. In its latest $122 billion funding round, Amazon contributed $50 billion and Nvidia contributed $30 billion. Neither of them are simply financial investors; rather, they secured strategic returns through computing power supply and cloud service contracts.

However, market judgment has undergone a structural shift. The logic determining the outcome of the AI ​​race is shifting from "whoever raises the most funding and has the most grand narrative" to "whoever can create value for users with the lowest cost, highest efficiency, and most precise market positioning." Under this new logic, Anthropic currently holds the upper hand.