According to Business Insider , secondary market transactions value Anthropic at approximately one trillion dollars (about 853 billion euros), which means the company would be over 100 billion dollars more valuable than OpenAI. On the other hand, official funding rounds are still on a completely different level: Anthropic's latest funding round valued it at approximately 380 billion dollars, and OpenAI's corresponding latest funding round valued the company at 852 billion dollars.
The differences between the valuations of funding rounds and private trading platforms primarily indicate that smaller, private investors are willing to pay significantly more for Anthropic's shares than the large entities participating in funding rounds have paid for them so far.
The sharp increase in valuation primarily reflects the company's rapid revenue growth. Anthropic's annual revenue was approximately 9 billion dollars at the end of 2025, but by March 2026, it had already risen to over 30 billion. This is particularly due to the tremendous surge in popularity of the company's programming assistant, Claude Code, which began in late 2025.
Google blocked Apple's acquisition plans?
One long-held "certain" speculation within the industry has revolved around the idea that tech giant Apple had long been looking to acquire Anthropic for itself. Apple has fallen significantly behind in AI development and is, for example, moving towards using Google's AI in its upcoming iPhone releases, albeit under the "Apple Intelligence" brand.
But now it seems that Apple's potential plans to acquire Anthropic can be definitively forgotten, as Google announced this week that it will invest up to 40 billion dollars in Anthropic. Simultaneously, the companies agreed that Anthropic commits to purchasing AI computing server capacity from Google for billions in the coming years.
By owning a large stake in Anthropic, Google can, if it wishes, prevent or at least make it very difficult for Apple - or any other of Google's competitors - to acquire Anthropic for itself. Earlier this week, another tech giant, Amazon also invested in Anthropic, to the tune of 25 billion dollars.
At the same time, the deal is yet another proof that, in addition to money, server computing capacity is becoming a new, quite strong currency in the mutual transactions of AI companies. Data centers cannot be built instantly, so if an investor can offer existing computing capacity in addition to money, it is often more valuable than hard cash for rapidly growing AI companies.
Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 25 Apr 2026 12:24
