Anthropic has had an incredible couple of months, and that’s now showing in its valuations.
On Ventuals — a platform that lets traders speculate on private company valuations using perpetual futures contracts — Anthropic’s implied valuation briefly overtook OpenAI’s this week, with Anthropic trading at $846.02B against OpenAI’s $838.95B. That’s a striking inversion for a company that, just over a year ago, was valued at $61.5 billion.
What Is Ventuals?
Ventuals is an on-chain perpetual futures protocol built on Hyperliquid that lets retail traders take long or short positions on the valuations of private, pre-IPO companies — companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, and others that ordinary investors have historically been locked out of.
The mechanics are straightforward: instead of trading shares, you trade on whether you think a company’s total valuation will go up or down. Positions are denominated in “Valuation Units” — the company’s valuation divided by one billion — so a price of 846 on the Anthropic contract means the market is implying a valuation of $846 billion.
Ventuals constructs its pricing through a hybrid oracle model that blends two inputs. One-third of the oracle price comes from external valuation data — sourced from Notice, which aggregates secondary market transactions, the latest funding round prices, and 409A assessments (the IRS-recognized standard for fair market value of private equity). The remaining two-thirds is a two-hour exponential moving average of the on-chain mark price, which reflects real-time trader sentiment and allows for price discovery beyond what the latest funding round would suggest.
A Significant Caveat
The Ventuals price is not Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s actual valuation. It is a speculative market signal — the aggregate view of traders on a derivatives platform, informed by but not tethered to, last-round funding data.
Private companies don’t have continuous mark-to-market valuations the way public stocks do. Their “official” valuation is set at the moment of a funding round and stays frozen until the next one. Ventuals attempts to fill that gap by creating continuous price discovery, but the resulting number is shaped as much by trader positioning, leverage, and sentiment as it is by underlying fundamentals.
Where The Companies Actually Stand
In the real world of funding rounds, OpenAI remains significantly more valuable than Anthropic — at least on paper.
OpenAI closed its most recent round in late March 2026, raising $122 billion at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Anthropic’s most recent round was its Series G in February 2026, raising $30 billion at a $380 billion post-money valuation — itself the second-largest private tech deal ever recorded. So the headline valuation gap is real: $852B for OpenAI versus $380B for Anthropic at their last respective funding rounds — a 2x+ difference.
Why The Market Might Have A Point
The speculative inversion on Ventuals isn’t coming from nowhere. Anthropic has been on an extraordinary run.
Anthropic’s revenue hit a $30 billion annualized run-rate in early April 2026 — up from $9 billion at the close of 2025 and $14 billion when it raised its Series G in February. That’s a 3x increase in roughly three months. For context, the company went from $100 million in revenue in 2023 to $1 billion in 2024, to $4.5 billion by mid-2025, and is now tracking at $30 billion. There is genuinely no precedent for this kind of revenue growth in enterprise technology history.
OpenAI, meanwhile, disclosed $2 billion in monthly revenue — a $24 billion annualized figure — at the time of its April round. The comparison is somewhat muddied by the fact that the two companies report revenue differently: Anthropic books cloud reseller revenue on a gross basis, while OpenAI reports on a net basis. Adjusting for methodology, the gap narrows — but Anthropic’s growth rate, at roughly 10x annually versus OpenAI’s 3x, is not in dispute.
On the enterprise battleground, the more an industry matures in AI adoption, the more it tends to prefer Anthropic over OpenAI, per Ramp Index data tracking spend across 50,000+ US businesses. Anthropic went from capturing roughly 10% of combined OpenAI-Anthropic business subscription spend in early 2025 to over 65% by February 2026. Claude Code alone is generating over $2.5 billion in annualized revenue, with weekly active users doubling since January.
The Bottom Line
The pricing on the platform reflects speculative positioning as much as fundamental analysis. Anthropic’s actual last-round valuation of $380 billion is still less than half of OpenAI’s $852 billion. That gap will not be erased by a candlestick chart. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. Anthropic’s revenue is growing faster, its enterprise market share is expanding, and the Ventuals market — imperfect as it is — is reflecting a thesis that the gap between the two companies’ fundamental worth is closing faster than the funding round numbers suggest.