Anthropic is suddenly the hottest name in private-market AI — at least on secondary trading platforms. Shares of the startup are trading at roughly a $1 trillion implied valuation on Forge Global, according to Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques, putting Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which is changing hands at about $880 billion on the same marketplace.
Anecdotal evidence is piling up: traders on Twitter posted offers topping $1 trillion for Anthropic stakes, and activity on private-share trackers is surging. Caplight says interest in Anthropic jumped more than 650% over the past 12 months.
How did this happen so fast?
- February 2026’s big picture: Anthropic closed a $30 billion Series G led by GIC and Coatue at a $380 billion post-money valuation. Secondary-market bids have since pushed the implied value to almost three times that level.
- Revenue momentum: Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate was roughly $9 billion late last year; by March 2026 it had climbed to about $30 billion — a 233% increase in one quarter — driven largely by enterprise adoption of Claude Code and API sales.
- Strategic backing: Amazon’s move to commit up to $25 billion in additional investment boosted confidence and market appetite.
- Supply crunch: Employees and early investors have had few chances to exit. With robust buyer demand and limited sell-side supply, small minority stakes have been snapped up quickly, pushing headline valuations higher. Rainmaker Securities’ Glen Anderson noted that bids near a $960 billion valuation were being gobbled up within hours.
OpenAI’s secondary-market picture is more muted. On Forge, OpenAI’s implied valuation (~$880B) sits only slightly above its early-2026 fundraising price (~$852B), and Caplight reports more sellers than buyers for OpenAI shares on secondaries in Q1.
Important caveats
- Secondary-market prices reflect what buyers will pay for small, illiquid minority stakes with no board rights — not what a company would fetch in a full primary raise or IPO. These trades don’t automatically translate into a true “company-wide” valuation.
- Reporting suggests Anthropic is eyeing a public listing as soon as late 2026, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan advising and an IPO target valuation in the $400–$500 billion range. Work toward an IPO has reportedly been underway since at least late 2025.
Why crypto and market participants should care
- The frenzy highlights how private secondary markets can create eye-popping headline valuations that diverge from primary-market and IPO expectations.
- For tokenizers, investors, and traders watching AI exposure in private markets, the Anthropic story is a reminder that liquidity dynamics and buyer composition can dramatically skew perceived value — for better or worse.
Bottom line: secondary-market bids have pushed Anthropic’s implied valuation into trillion-dollar territory, but that figure is a reflection of hot demand for small stakes in a thin market — not a definitive measure of what the company would raise or list for in a public offering.
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