As a global leader in AI applications, Anthropic’s implied pre-IPO valuation has recently surpassed the historic threshold of $1 trillion through on-chain private market transactions. This milestone means the AI powerhouse is highly likely to outpace OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT and its long-standing strongest rival, in valuation ahead of its highly anticipated IPO, marking another extreme valuation milestone in the artificial intelligence investment boom.

This critical milestone is backed by official pre-IPO trading instruments traded on Jupiter, a decentralized on-chain public trading platform. Supported by exposure to special purpose vehicles targeting Anthropic, these instruments provide investors with a real-time valuation proxy to gauge the company’s potential pricing in the public market.

In a public post on X on Monday Eastern Time, The Kobeissi Letter cited the latest on-chain transaction data, noting that the implied valuation has skyrocketed by 733% since October 2025. Alongside OpenAI and SpaceX, the space exploration leader founded and led by Elon Musk, Anthropic is widely regarded among private trading markets as one of the next batch of trillion-dollar tech giants poised for public listing.

Anthropic: The AI Giant Most Likely to Challenge OpenAI’s Valuation Supremacy

Notably, the latest decentralized on-chain figure does not represent Anthropic’s official valuation. As a global developer of blockbuster AI software including the Claude AI agent suite, the company has received multiple financing bids from Wall Street institutional investors for a new funding round. These offers could value the AI unicorn at $800 billion or higher, more than doubling its $350 billion pre-money valuation attached to its $30 billion financing round in February, reflecting an unprecedented surge in valuation.

Real-money betting data from prediction market Kalshi indicates that Anthropic holds a 68% probability of completing its U.S. stock market IPO before January 1, 2027.

Founded in 2021 by former core employees of OpenAI, including Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s flagship offerings include the Claude large language model series, Claude Code, and enterprise-grade AI agent tool Claude Cowork. It positions itself as a world-leading AI tech firm focused on "safety, interpretability and controllability". Per its official website, Anthropic is an AI safety and research company dedicated to building reliable, interpretable and controllable AI systems.

Enterprises’ urgent demand for efficiency improvement and operational cost reduction has greatly accelerated the large-scale adoption of two core categories of AI software: generative AI applications and AI agents. Capable of independently handling tedious and complex tasks, AI agents are poised to become the definitive development trend of AI applications over the next decade and beyond. The evolution of AI agents has transformed artificial intelligence from an information-assisted tool into a highly intelligent productivity solution. According to the latest research from MarketsandMarkets, the global AI agent market is projected to reach $53 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46% starting from 2025.

The explosive rise of task-autonomous AI agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Cowork and OpenClaw in 2026 is no coincidence. It essentially stems from the rare convergence of five core development curves: comprehensive model capabilities, tool invocation protocols, AI developer frameworks, declining inference costs, and advanced long-context processing. At the AI application layer, AI agents are set to become the dominant business interface, converting pure intelligence into actionable outcomes. This represents a pivotal shift for AI, evolving from passive Q&A tools to solutions capable of independent execution, cross-team collaboration and delivering highly sophisticated multi-step workflows.

A clear distinction must be drawn between official financing valuation and private secondary market implied valuation when comparing Anthropic and OpenAI. Based on credible financing data reported by Bloomberg, Reuters and other mainstream media, Anthropic secured a financing valuation of approximately $380 billion in February, with the highest institutional bids recently climbing to $800 billion. By contrast, OpenAI’s latest financing valuation stands at roughly $852 billion. From a formal financing perspective, Anthropic has yet to surpass OpenAI, currently the highest-valued player in cutting-edge AI technology.

Nevertheless, on unofficial metrics including private secondary market and on-chain trading, Anthropic’s implied valuation has indeed broken the $1 trillion mark, surpassing OpenAI by this measure. However, such pricing primarily reflects marginal quotations driven by equity scarcity and AI investment euphoria, and cannot be equated with the company’s official valuation. In essence, Anthropic’s stratospheric valuation growth is underpinned by multiple drivers: AI agents disrupting the software sector, explosive enterprise revenue growth, fierce competition among cloud giants for strategic stakes, and strong IPO scarcity expectations. Even so, the $1 trillion valuation is largely a marginal pricing result fueled by FOMO sentiment and liquidity constraints in the private market.

The AI Disruption Era: Software Sector Repricing Driven by Anthropic’s Valuation Surge

Undoubtedly, the narrative of "AI disruption across all industries" has ignited a new round of corporate operational efficiency revolution. Block, led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, laid off over 4,000 employees, nearly half of its total workforce. Major North American tech firms including Meta, parent company of Facebook, and Snap, operator of Snapchat, have also launched large-scale workforce reductions. Block’s official statement acknowledged that AI agent-powered workflow tools enable lean teams to maintain far higher operational efficiency. The company’s CFO further emphasized that productivity gains brought by AI-driven agent workflows have made large-scale workforce downsizing almost inevitable for all enterprises.

Major AI model developers such as Anthropic and OpenAI have recently launched a full suite of high-efficiency agentic workflow products. These AI solutions are poised to replace a wide range of functional software services at a much lower cost, triggering a severe sell-off across global software stocks.

The pervasive bearish sentiment of "AI disruption" since February stems from mounting market concerns that rapidly adopted AI agent workflows represented by Claude Cowork and OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and Moltbot) will erode the entire SaaS empire built on seat subscription revenue models. The sell-off has rippled across cybersecurity, online education, traditional finance, insurance, real estate, transportation and all labor-intensive or subscription-based industries, with investors fearing comprehensive disruption brought by artificial intelligence.

The software sector across global equity markets has remained under sustained pressure since February amid AI-driven market panic. Despite a surge in share repurchases among U.S. software firms, investors remain unconfident, as core concerns focus on the long-term fundamentals and business models of traditional software enterprises facing fundamental restructuring led by AI agents like Claude Cowork.

Anthropic’s rollout of advanced AI agent tools served as a critical trigger for the panic sell-off in software stocks starting in February. More accurately, Anthropic alone did not topple the software sector; instead, its Claude agent tools forced the market to recognize that leading AI model providers are restructuring enterprise application layers, posing tangible threats to traditional SaaS profit pools spanning legal services, sales, marketing, data analytics and software development.

In February, a single legal AI plugin launched by Anthropic triggered a market value wipeout of $830 billion across global software and service stocks within just six trading days. Shortly afterward, Wall Street heavyweight Morgan Stanley warned that the spillover impact of AI on software business models could spread to the $1.5 trillion U.S. private credit market, where software-related loans account for 16% of total exposure. Dubbed the "Anthropic Storm", this impact is not a temporary negative catalyst, but an unprecedented structural shock to the entire valuation framework of the global software industry.

Following on-site participation in the HumanX Global AI Summit in San Francisco, analysts at global investment bank UBS pointed out that OpenAI and Anthropic are evolving from leading large AI model vendors into major consumers of enterprise IT budgets. As noted in UBS’s research report, next-generation advanced AI models developed by Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier AI firms pose substantial downward risks to the fundamental growth prospects of traditional software companies, enabling AI leaders to capture a growing share of enterprise IT spending.

Anthropic stands firmly in the first tier of the booming global AI Agent track, with prominent advantages in code automation, enterprise process automation, complex task execution and safety-aligned model development. Google has unveiled plans to invest up to $400 billion in Anthropic, while Amazon has also ramped up its strategic investment in the company. Per Anthropic’s official disclosure, its annualized revenue run rate has jumped from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion as of April 2026.

Widely popular among global professional developers, Claude Code and enterprise agent tools such as Claude Cowork have delivered disruptive impacts on the global software ecosystem. Anthropic has also launched the Claude Partner Network, committing $100 million to support corporate clients in large-scale adoption of the Claude AI suite. These core competitive strengths collectively solidify Anthropic’s market narrative as a global leader in enterprise AI applications.