TechFlow News, April 2, according to Bloomberg, OpenAI shares are losing appeal in the secondary market and, in some cases, are nearly impossible to sell. Ken Smythe, founder of secondary-market platform Next Round Capital, revealed that approximately six institutional investors recently attempted to offload roughly $600 million worth of OpenAI shares—but found no buyers. Meanwhile, buyers have signaled readiness to invest $2 billion into Anthropic.
Multiple secondary-market platforms—including Augment and Hiive—have recorded record demand for Anthropic shares, with valuation bids reaching approximately $600 billion, representing over a 50% premium relative to its previous funding round valuation of $38 billion.
Analysts note that the substantial valuation gap between OpenAI’s current $85.2 billion valuation and Anthropic’s makes the latter more attractive on a risk-adjusted return basis. Additionally, OpenAI’s high operating costs and slow enterprise customer acquisition have prompted caution among some investors, whereas Anthropic’s dominant position in the high-margin enterprise market has led to broad optimism regarding its growth prospects.
