Anthropic’s tokenized pre‑IPO shares now imply a $1.2T valuation—above OpenAI—showing how on‑chain markets are front‑running late‑stage AI pricing before any IPO.
Summary
- Anthropic’s on-chain pre-IPO valuation has surged to around $1.2 trillion, making it the most richly valued private AI company and pushing it ahead of OpenAI’s implied secondary-market price for the first time.
- The move continues a stunning repricing of Anthropic on tokenized pre-IPO venues like Jupiter’s Prestocks and private-share platforms such as Forge Global and Hiive, where its implied value has climbed more than 700–900% since October 2025.
- The gap between Anthropic’s last official round at $380 billion and its current on-chain valuation underscores how aggressively crypto-native secondary markets are front-running a potential IPO and recasting the AI startup race as a two-horse contest it is now perceived to be winning over OpenAI.
In February 2026, Anthropic closed a Series G round at a $380 billion post-money valuation, led by GIC and Coatue, already putting it in the ultra-elite tier of private tech firms. Since then, secondary trading has gone parabolic. On Forge Global, CEO Kelly Rodriques says Anthropic shares are now changing hands at prices that imply a valuation “around the $1 trillion threshold,” with OpenAI trading closer to $880 billion on the same platform. That inversion—Anthropic above OpenAI—did not exist three months ago and marks a sharp reversal in investor expectations for which lab will dominate the next phase of the AI cycle.
On-chain markets have pushed even further. As crypto.news reported in a recent piece on Anthropic’s pre-IPO tokenization, Jupiter’s Prestocks venue now prices tokenized Anthropic exposure at levels implying a $1+ trillion valuation, after a 733% run-up since October 2025. A fresh blast of demand in early May has extended that rally, with data shared by The Kobeissi Letter showing Anthropic’s implied IPO value reaching $1.2 trillion, up 20% in a single week and nearly 900% over roughly seven months of active on-chain trading. Those tokenized instruments are backed 1:1 by SPV exposure to Anthropic shares, giving speculators a real-time proxy for where public markets might price the company if it listed today.
By contrast, OpenAI’s last widely cited mark is around $852–880 billion in private-share markets, with some large investors quietly questioning whether that level fully reflects execution risk, governance noise, and intensifying competition from Anthropic and a resurgent Google DeepMind. In a deeper explainer, crypto.news argued that the on-chain pre-IPO segment is increasingly acting like a price-discovery lab for late-stage AI valuations, with Anthropic’s Jupiter pricing feeding back into Forge quotes and vice versa, creating a loop where aggressive crypto-native expectations leak into TradFi secondary platforms and back again.
OpenAI dethroned (for now) in the AI valuation race
The headline shift is brutal in its simplicity: Anthropic is now priced as worth more than OpenAI in the markets that trade their equity surrogates, both on-chain and off. Business Insider recently flagged that Anthropic’s valuation on Forge Global has hovered near $1 trillion, above OpenAI’s $880 billion, while LinkedIn posts tracking Jupiter and Forge data note Anthropic has “officially crossed $1 trillion” and joined OpenAI and SpaceX as the only private firms to reach that mark. Kobeissi’s latest update pushes that implied number to $1.2 trillion, and some social metrics and Instagram breakdowns even float snapshots where Anthropic’s implied value temporarily touches $1.5–1.6 trillion, depending on which on-chain series and FX assumptions are used.
In earlier coverage, crypto.news emphasized how Anthropic’s pricing on Jupiter Prestocks has tended to lead revisions on TradFi platforms like Forge Global and Hiive, with the latter recently quoting the company at roughly $851 billion based on share prices near $849 apiece—already far above the official Series G mark. That gap between “last round” and “live market” has now blown out. The on-chain market is effectively saying: this is not just another decacorn; it is a quasi-mega-cap, comparable in implied value to top-ten public tech names before it has even filed an S‑1.
For OpenAI, the optics matter. As a crypto.news analysis of OpenAI’s valuation jitters noted, some of the lab’s own investors have started to voice concerns that its push into enterprise SaaS and more closed licensing models could narrow its upside relative to Anthropic’s more API-centric, safety-branded approach. With the differential in secondary valuations now widening—not narrowing—those doubts will only intensify, especially as revenue numbers leak out showing Anthropic catching up on, or in some snapshots even surpassing, OpenAI’s top line on a smaller capital base.
Tokenized pre-IPO markets as AI valuation engines
Underneath the headline numbers is a structural shift: tokenized pre-IPO markets are becoming central to how investors price late-stage AI risk. On Jupiter’s Prestocks, Anthropic exposure is wrapped into tokens that represent claims on SPVs holding the underlying shares, letting crypto traders buy, sell, and hedge around the clock. That structure gives a technically global, retail-heavy audience a lever on what was once the exclusive domain of specialist secondary funds and well-connected family offices.
Crypto.news has been tracking this in a broader series on tokenized private equity and AI, arguing that the combination of 24/7 liquidity, permissionless access, and high social virality can produce faster and more reflexive repricings than traditional secondary platforms. Anthropic’s move from $380 billion in February to an implied $1.2 trillion today is the purest expression of that dynamic so far: a tripling (or more) of value in less than three months, with the center of gravity sitting not in San Francisco lawyers’ offices but on an on-chain order book.
Prediction markets are reacting as well. One lines.com market tracking Anthropic’s eventual IPO closing market cap now assigns the highest probability band (39%) to a $600–900 billion outcome, with thinner but non-trivial odds on a trillion-plus close—numbers that still lag the $1.2 trillion being implied on Jupiter, suggesting a wedge between “pricing in the casino” and “what disciplined bettors think a first-day close looks like.” Crypto.news, in a recent breakdown of AI IPO odds and tokenized bets, framed this as a tension between exuberant pre-IPO tokens and more sober event markets, with Anthropic as the main case study.
In traditional finance, this would already be a mania. In crypto, it looks like the logical endpoint of a world where everything—even the world’s most hyped private AI labs—eventually becomes a ticker, a perp, and a basis trade. For now, the scoreboard is simple: on the markets that matter to speculators, Anthropic is the new king of private AI, and OpenAI is, for the first time, playing catch-up.
