GoKawiilAccording to a Business Insider report today, Anthropic — the company behind Claude AI — has surged to a one-trillion-dollar valuation on private secondary trading market Forge Global, surpassing competitor OpenAI’s $880 billion valuation in the same markets. The surge highlights a steep uptick in investor demand for exposure to artificial intelligence, but what do these figures really mean, and what exactly is driving this spike?
Because neither Anthropic nor OpenAI is publicly listed, most investors cannot access shares through traditional stock exchanges. Instead, trades occur on secondary marketplaces, where early employees or investors can sell portions of their holdings.
These markets behave very differently from public equities: Supply is limited, as few insiders are willing to sell; pricing is based on individual deals, making transactions opaque; and valuations are controlled by a small handful of very powerful investors.
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Anthropic's actual valuation is anchored in its latest round of funding in February 2026, in which the company received a consensus $380 billion post-money valuation following due diligence and structured negotiations with institutional investors.
However, the $1 trillion secondary market valuation reflects what people without access are willing to pay for a slice of Anthropic. Business Insider reports that, according to Ken Sawyer, cofounder and managing partner at Saints Capital, a venture secondary firm, an Anthropic shareholder recently offered to unload shares at a $1.15 trillion valuation.
As unbelievable as that sounds, it appears people are willing to pay. In an X post this week, Jesse Leimgruber, founder of OpenHome, claimed that a "very well-known growth fund" offered to buy Anthropic shares at a $1.05 trillion valuation.
It gets crazier. In a LinkedIn post, one investor offered their 14-acre estate in exchange for Anthropic shares at a valuation of over $800 billion, more than twice the actual value.
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