> The large gap between OpenAI’s $852-billion valuation and Anthropic’s $380 billion has investors rushing to grab equity in the latter before it rises, according to Augment co-founder Adam Crawley.
Interesting, so there are a lot of people still eager to invest in valuations of well greater than a-quarter-trillion, but OpenAI's latest raise has sucked up all the oxygen for enthusiasm of that valuation going even higher.
Which could be a "dumb money" move ("competitor number lower, already-big-number is scary") or a "smart money" move ("Anthropic is gaining position-wise, and currently is lower valued, let's bet on the one we think is better positioned") or some mix of both.
OpenAI just raised a shit-ton so clearly there is plenty of money out there who don't think there's a bubble or even a blown opportunity there. But the wider community doesn't think they have the competition in the bag, while still being willing to invest in big-AI-cos at absolutely enormous valuations.
If local hardware/models get good enough to take 80%-90% of what people use subscriptions for today... hoo boy. Big-AI is a bet I wouldn't be confident placing billions on. Unless your horizon is more "wait for IPO or next raise or positive news, then get out ASAP" than "hold for 5+ years."
Did OpenAI really “raise” that much? The startup world is not my area of expertise but I remember reading language in the announcements that implied those dollar amounts where more of a conditional promise of money in the future instead of a check today.
Yeah if they sold 1/800th of the company for a billion dollars then they are valued at 800b even if they only have a billion dollars. It’s advantageous for investors to both buy in as cheaply as possible but also have future investors to buy in as expensive as possible to prop up a, perhaps inaccurate, valuation.
Vibe coding requires the sota models to work at all, but someone who knows what they are doing and uses the AI more responsibly can absolutely use the cheaper Chinese models for coding, and they’re often faster too. If I was one of the big players my entire focus would be on lobbying for regulation and outright banning of local models.
Yeah, Qwen3 coder for Claude Code and 3.5 for OpenClaw replaced my full-stack use of Opus 4.6 already; it's fine for basic web apps, k8s/docker infra setup, optimizing AI models etc. with only slightly higher error rate than Opus. Upcoming 3.6 together with Gemma4 might make it even better (still to test). OpenAI's memory spot market play might have been directed at local inference as well.
Look for Deepseek 4 when it drops, I’m curious how good it will be.
The thing is, if you’re using AI responsibly today you’re already breaking down tasks to such a granular level that you don’t need the power of Opus. You can save that for deeper research tasks.
I am playing around with this at home right now. I think a lot of the latest improvements came with the harness, instead of AI.
The part I am working on is to have better tools and data to search over. Curated for my needs. Similar to the Karpathy post yesterday about his wiki. I am trying something similar and even qwen 3.5 is totally fine for most of what I do.
Disclaimer: I bought memory before the crisis started. Not sure if I would build my PC as is now..
I don’t know how OpenAI screwed this up. They had the best tech, the largest installed base, the best brand recognition.
And somehow instead of prosecuting the lead in all areas, they got all hubristic and sloppy and just failed to iterate on the core product, while also failing to respond quickly when Anthropic showed that coding agents are the flywheel that makes the whole company faster.
It’s like they thought they had an unassailable monopoly and speedran to the lazy incumbent position, all in a matter of months.
Anecdotally, I would actually argue tbe opposite - Anthropic is overrated, ass-kissed way too much here for mediocre coding abilities (especially for Elixir). ChatGPT most of the time one-shots complex solutions in comparison. The only reason why people shit on OpenAI so much is because of the defence deal, but, it's not like Anthropic is a saint either:
It's clearly because they didn't hire me after I applied :)
In all seriousness, I use Codex for work and Claude at home, and I feel like nowadays they're actually pretty competitive with each other. I don't know that it's that far behind.
I agree that they clearly erroneously assumed that no one would be able to catch up with them, though. OpenAI had such a head start that that should have been by itself a moat.
Sam lost the plot for me. He took too many interviews which led me to not trust him. Last straw came with him standing by Anthropic one day then throwing them under the bus the next. He showed little awareness on why that is problematic.
That's why I changed as well. I got really irritated how Altman tried to get the social credit by having principles, only to change them the moment it was convenient.
Coding assistants won't win this game. They sure will win the hearts of developers, but to scale you need mass adoption and products for which users want to pay substantially. OpenAI is falling behind in the small features in their chat and app offering and have failed to innovate in their expensive offerings.
Codex btw is getting very competitive. It is fast and no longer far behind.
The strategic playbook of the web era said: Get a huge userbase of normies, then figure out how to monetise them (usually via advertising). OpenAI stumbled into the userbase via ChatGPT, but it's unclear if the strategy or the economics apply to AI. Anthropic tried to compete in the consumer market, but couldn't, so focussed on coding and enterprise, and it looks like that's actually turning into a smart choice, at least right now, because it turns out people will pay subscription costs for agents that do their job for them.
There are three possible paths that sort of substantiate current valuations:
1) Business: LLMs become essential to every company, and you become rich by selling the best enterprise tools to everyone.
2) Consumer: LLMs cannibalize search and a good chunk of the internet, so people end up interacting with your AI assistant instead of opening any websites. You start serving ads and take Google's lunch.
3) Superhuman AGI: you beat everyone else to the punch to build a life form superior to humans, this doesn't end up in a disaster, and you then steal underpants, ???, profit.
Anthropic is clearly betting on #1. Google decided to beat everyone else to #2, and they can probably do it better and more cheaply than others because of their existing infra and the way they're plugged into people's digital lives. And OpenAI... I guess banked on #3 and this is perhaps looking less certain now?
Any publicly available evidence to back that up? There have been post-exit blog posts from OpenAI employees on HN before and it did sound like the only black magic they use there is that many employees work 16 hrs a day during launch of new features. I know that some current Claude Code devs are doing interviews where they claim that they use Claude Code extensively but they clearly have a conflict of interest while they are still employed at Anthropic, so it would be like asking a barber if you need a haircut.
Investors do not care about the product, the users, etc. They care about cash. There are lots of ways to make cash that don't involve having a good product. But if you commit to spending a trillion dollars on hardware, then borrow hundreds of billions in the short term, and it turns out there's no way to recoup the cost, the investors go looking for better returns. This would've worked back in the old days of a bull market, angels looking for the next whale (with "modest" $5BN investments), and startups with no rivals. But in a bear market with multiple competitors trading on a commodity? Lol. Finally the bubble bursts.
Anthropic is not meaningfully better. Their stance is “the good guys have to make money to be in the fight with the bad guys” and so they do all the things their perceived bad guys do. I don’t know how they can do any different, but we just trust them to be good? What is the difference?
let me know when they scrap the data centers, id love to get some good deals on hvac equiptment. these companies cannot possibly make enough money when you can run something on your own computer that works mostly as good
Both of these valuations are absolutely absurd. I guess Anthropic looks good in comparison, but I don't want to hold that bag.
The Chinese models are catching up in quality while being a fraction of the price. The market will speak, how many devices that contributed to this thread were made in the USA?
Sure you can argue the Chinese companies are heavily subsidized, but no major LLM lab is remotely close to making a profit this decade.
Odd timing...Everything I've read about Claude the last several days suggests that its users are disappointed, even furious at what's happened to its performance.
I wonder how much of this is associated with Scam Altman's personal negative PR and Anthropic's recent PR wins.
I'm inclined to think there isn't much of an association becauss investors don't seem very concerned with morality, but I know ~dozen developers that either switched to, or started using Claude in the past month or so, while not knowing anyone that uses Codex.
They want to see the CEO communicate a path to profitability. Anthropic has - purely by focusing.
OAI in contrast is all over the place and they haven’t shown they’ve learned.
Zuckerberg got punished for his metaverse nonsense and investors were correct to be skeptical and reflect that in the stock price. Altman thinks he’s a god and the rules don’t apply to him. More fool him.
not to mention the drama that's followed the company from the very beginning. It think its getting to a point where the character issues can no longer be ignored bc it's directly affecting business
I think the IPO and subsequent quarterly earnings where they will be pressured by analysts will pop it all.
I was watching a recent Jensen Huang Q&A with analysts and it was essentially “just trust me bro”. They’re all interconnected - once there’s a correction for one player, all get affected.
Can’t wait to finally get this over with so we can finally move on.
The gap between hype and reality needs to be corrected.
> The large gap between OpenAI’s $852-billion valuation and Anthropic’s $380 billion has investors rushing to grab equity in the latter before it rises, according to Augment co-founder Adam Crawley.
Interesting, so there are a lot of people still eager to invest in valuations of well greater than a-quarter-trillion, but OpenAI's latest raise has sucked up all the oxygen for enthusiasm of that valuation going even higher.
Which could be a "dumb money" move ("competitor number lower, already-big-number is scary") or a "smart money" move ("Anthropic is gaining position-wise, and currently is lower valued, let's bet on the one we think is better positioned") or some mix of both.
OpenAI just raised a shit-ton so clearly there is plenty of money out there who don't think there's a bubble or even a blown opportunity there. But the wider community doesn't think they have the competition in the bag, while still being willing to invest in big-AI-cos at absolutely enormous valuations.
If local hardware/models get good enough to take 80%-90% of what people use subscriptions for today... hoo boy. Big-AI is a bet I wouldn't be confident placing billions on. Unless your horizon is more "wait for IPO or next raise or positive news, then get out ASAP" than "hold for 5+ years."
Did OpenAI really “raise” that much? The startup world is not my area of expertise but I remember reading language in the announcements that implied those dollar amounts where more of a conditional promise of money in the future instead of a check today.
Yeah if they sold 1/800th of the company for a billion dollars then they are valued at 800b even if they only have a billion dollars. It’s advantageous for investors to both buy in as cheaply as possible but also have future investors to buy in as expensive as possible to prop up a, perhaps inaccurate, valuation.
[delayed]
Vibe coding requires the sota models to work at all, but someone who knows what they are doing and uses the AI more responsibly can absolutely use the cheaper Chinese models for coding, and they’re often faster too. If I was one of the big players my entire focus would be on lobbying for regulation and outright banning of local models.
Yeah, Qwen3 coder for Claude Code and 3.5 for OpenClaw replaced my full-stack use of Opus 4.6 already; it's fine for basic web apps, k8s/docker infra setup, optimizing AI models etc. with only slightly higher error rate than Opus. Upcoming 3.6 together with Gemma4 might make it even better (still to test). OpenAI's memory spot market play might have been directed at local inference as well.
Look for Deepseek 4 when it drops, I’m curious how good it will be.
The thing is, if you’re using AI responsibly today you’re already breaking down tasks to such a granular level that you don’t need the power of Opus. You can save that for deeper research tasks.
I am playing around with this at home right now. I think a lot of the latest improvements came with the harness, instead of AI.
The part I am working on is to have better tools and data to search over. Curated for my needs. Similar to the Karpathy post yesterday about his wiki. I am trying something similar and even qwen 3.5 is totally fine for most of what I do.
Disclaimer: I bought memory before the crisis started. Not sure if I would build my PC as is now..
I don’t know how OpenAI screwed this up. They had the best tech, the largest installed base, the best brand recognition.
And somehow instead of prosecuting the lead in all areas, they got all hubristic and sloppy and just failed to iterate on the core product, while also failing to respond quickly when Anthropic showed that coding agents are the flywheel that makes the whole company faster.
It’s like they thought they had an unassailable monopoly and speedran to the lazy incumbent position, all in a matter of months.
Anecdotally, I would actually argue tbe opposite - Anthropic is overrated, ass-kissed way too much here for mediocre coding abilities (especially for Elixir). ChatGPT most of the time one-shots complex solutions in comparison. The only reason why people shit on OpenAI so much is because of the defence deal, but, it's not like Anthropic is a saint either:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...
Same thing happened to Blackberry. Tech head start wasn't that big and product wasn't that sticky.
It's clearly because they didn't hire me after I applied :)
In all seriousness, I use Codex for work and Claude at home, and I feel like nowadays they're actually pretty competitive with each other. I don't know that it's that far behind.
I agree that they clearly erroneously assumed that no one would be able to catch up with them, though. OpenAI had such a head start that that should have been by itself a moat.
Does it matter that codex is now as good as claude code?
Check dev spaces like twitter and discord and all anyone talks about is claude-code, openclaw, opus 4.6 etc.
The mindshare went to anthropic.
that's why openai bought openclaw
Sam lost the plot for me. He took too many interviews which led me to not trust him. Last straw came with him standing by Anthropic one day then throwing them under the bus the next. He showed little awareness on why that is problematic.
That's why I changed as well. I got really irritated how Altman tried to get the social credit by having principles, only to change them the moment it was convenient.
Coding assistants won't win this game. They sure will win the hearts of developers, but to scale you need mass adoption and products for which users want to pay substantially. OpenAI is falling behind in the small features in their chat and app offering and have failed to innovate in their expensive offerings.
Codex btw is getting very competitive. It is fast and no longer far behind.
The strategic playbook of the web era said: Get a huge userbase of normies, then figure out how to monetise them (usually via advertising). OpenAI stumbled into the userbase via ChatGPT, but it's unclear if the strategy or the economics apply to AI. Anthropic tried to compete in the consumer market, but couldn't, so focussed on coding and enterprise, and it looks like that's actually turning into a smart choice, at least right now, because it turns out people will pay subscription costs for agents that do their job for them.
There are three possible paths that sort of substantiate current valuations:
1) Business: LLMs become essential to every company, and you become rich by selling the best enterprise tools to everyone.
2) Consumer: LLMs cannibalize search and a good chunk of the internet, so people end up interacting with your AI assistant instead of opening any websites. You start serving ads and take Google's lunch.
3) Superhuman AGI: you beat everyone else to the punch to build a life form superior to humans, this doesn't end up in a disaster, and you then steal underpants, ???, profit.
Anthropic is clearly betting on #1. Google decided to beat everyone else to #2, and they can probably do it better and more cheaply than others because of their existing infra and the way they're plugged into people's digital lives. And OpenAI... I guess banked on #3 and this is perhaps looking less certain now?
But will they pay the unsubsidized cost when anthropic needs to turn a profit?
And they actually can’t increase the price much.
Token generation is the metric Jensen Huang keeps pushing to temper analysts, which also affect nvidia’s future expected cash flows of course.
If increasing the price causes that metric to drop, the whole narrative falls apart and fear will spread in the stock market.
They’re all racing very close to the edge. Some closer than others.
The reality is given how much OAI has raised, they have to get to a place where they are doing insane revenues…
We’re talking on the level of meta, google and probably more if they keep raising money.
They really went all in with hubris and they’re gonna get punished eventually.
Agents increase the velocity of OpenAI and Anthropic; whomever has the best in-house agent moves the quickest.
Any publicly available evidence to back that up? There have been post-exit blog posts from OpenAI employees on HN before and it did sound like the only black magic they use there is that many employees work 16 hrs a day during launch of new features. I know that some current Claude Code devs are doing interviews where they claim that they use Claude Code extensively but they clearly have a conflict of interest while they are still employed at Anthropic, so it would be like asking a barber if you need a haircut.
Investors do not care about the product, the users, etc. They care about cash. There are lots of ways to make cash that don't involve having a good product. But if you commit to spending a trillion dollars on hardware, then borrow hundreds of billions in the short term, and it turns out there's no way to recoup the cost, the investors go looking for better returns. This would've worked back in the old days of a bull market, angels looking for the next whale (with "modest" $5BN investments), and startups with no rivals. But in a bear market with multiple competitors trading on a commodity? Lol. Finally the bubble bursts.
What kind of OI slop is this?
5.4 Extra high >> Opus 4.6
Depends on your work flow.
I find that for human in the loop Gemini beats both.
Been my experience as well, but generally the anti-Google sentiment here is pretty loud so you'll never see anyone praising Gemini here pretty much
Anthropic is not meaningfully better. Their stance is “the good guys have to make money to be in the fight with the bad guys” and so they do all the things their perceived bad guys do. I don’t know how they can do any different, but we just trust them to be good? What is the difference?
Approximately same service for half the valuation is definitely better. That said, Anthropomorphic is also very overvalued
The difference is no mass surveillance of US Citizens and no killing weapons without human supervision.
OpenAI is fine with those as long as they are "legal"... So pretty much they don't care at all.
I agree Anthropic is no saint but it's much, much better than OpenAI.
somewhat better leadership, I think
https://archive.ph/ExQkj
let me know when they scrap the data centers, id love to get some good deals on hvac equiptment. these companies cannot possibly make enough money when you can run something on your own computer that works mostly as good
Both of these valuations are absolutely absurd. I guess Anthropic looks good in comparison, but I don't want to hold that bag.
The Chinese models are catching up in quality while being a fraction of the price. The market will speak, how many devices that contributed to this thread were made in the USA?
Sure you can argue the Chinese companies are heavily subsidized, but no major LLM lab is remotely close to making a profit this decade.
Odd timing...Everything I've read about Claude the last several days suggests that its users are disappointed, even furious at what's happened to its performance.
Now that they’ve relegated OpenClaw to pay-as-you-go API usage, I hope the compute overload issues they’ve been facing will ease up some.
It's been working great for me. I haven't seen any changes.
I wonder how much of this is associated with Scam Altman's personal negative PR and Anthropic's recent PR wins.
I'm inclined to think there isn't much of an association becauss investors don't seem very concerned with morality, but I know ~dozen developers that either switched to, or started using Claude in the past month or so, while not knowing anyone that uses Codex.
The issue is investors want discipline.
They want to see the CEO communicate a path to profitability. Anthropic has - purely by focusing.
OAI in contrast is all over the place and they haven’t shown they’ve learned.
Zuckerberg got punished for his metaverse nonsense and investors were correct to be skeptical and reflect that in the stock price. Altman thinks he’s a god and the rules don’t apply to him. More fool him.
tl;dr nobody wants OpenAI shares and the secondary market has completely dried up.
“We literally couldn’t find anyone in our pool of hundreds of institutional investors to take these shares“
This doesn’t bode well for an IPO. The market is smelling a stinker.
Get your popcorn ready for a mad scramble to salvage investments if indeed the shark has been jumped.
not to mention the drama that's followed the company from the very beginning. It think its getting to a point where the character issues can no longer be ignored bc it's directly affecting business
I think the IPO and subsequent quarterly earnings where they will be pressured by analysts will pop it all.
I was watching a recent Jensen Huang Q&A with analysts and it was essentially “just trust me bro”. They’re all interconnected - once there’s a correction for one player, all get affected.
Can’t wait to finally get this over with so we can finally move on.
The gap between hype and reality needs to be corrected.