Anthropic has crossed a symbolic threshold that few private companies ever reach. On April 23, 2026, the Claude maker's implied valuation on secondary-market platforms surged to roughly $1 trillion, surpassing OpenAI and making it the most valuable private AI company in the world, according to reports from Forge Global and coverage by QuantoSei News and Polymarket.
The move caps a remarkable run. In February, Anthropic closed a $30 billion Series G funding round led by GIC and Coatue at a $380 billion valuation. On private-share exchanges today, bids have pushed the implied price to about $1 trillion, with one reported offer reaching as high as $1.15 trillion. OpenAI, by contrast, is trading around $880 billion on the same Forge Global platform.
What's driving the surge
The repricing is backed by unusually fast revenue growth. Anthropic's annualized revenue reportedly climbed from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to about $30 billion by March 2026, a more-than-threefold jump in a single quarter. Much of that expansion has come from enterprise adoption of Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant, which alone is said to generate more than $2.5 billion in annualized revenue.
The customer base has widened in parallel. Anthropic now reportedly serves more than 300,000 business customers, including over 1,000 clients spending more than $1 million annually, and counts eight of the Fortune 10 among its users. Roughly 80% of revenue is said to come from business customers, a mix that investors appear to view as stickier than consumer-heavy AI revenue.
Supply and demand on the secondary market
Much of the recent price action is a supply story. Secondary shares in Anthropic remain tightly held, and reports describe "feverish demand" from funds that missed earlier primary rounds and are now paying premiums to get in. That mismatch between limited float and aggressive bids helps explain the jump from $380 billion to an implied $1 trillion in just a few months, even without a new primary round.
For would-be public investors, the path forward is becoming clearer. Anthropic is reportedly preparing for an IPO as soon as October 2026, targeting a primary-offering valuation between $400 billion and $500 billion, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase advising. A listing at that range would still leave a significant gap between the IPO price and the current secondary-market implied value.
Implications
The crossover has practical consequences beyond bragging rights. It reshapes benchmarking for every AI fundraise in the pipeline, gives Anthropic additional leverage in compute deals with Google, Amazon and others, and intensifies the pressure on OpenAI to deliver growth that justifies its own valuation. It also sharpens the question regulators and enterprise buyers have been circling for a year: whether the private AI market's pricing is tracking genuine durable revenue, or the scarcity of shares in a handful of labs.
Either way, the leaderboard at the top of the AI industry has, at least on paper, flipped.
