OpenAI's $852bn valuation draws investor scrutiny as Anthropic competition heats up

OpenAI investors question $852bn valuation as strategy shifts

OpenAI's $852bn valuation is under increasing scrutiny from its own backers as the group switches focus to the enterprise market and tackling competition from Anthropic. A recent flurry of deals, initiatives and abandoned projects is designed to reorient the company around a new strategy: defend ChatGPT's dominance among consumers, while taking on Anthropic in the higher-margin market for corporate AI tools. Some OpenAI investors told the FT the changes could leave it vulnerable to Anthropic and a resurgent Google, all while preparing for a blockbuster initial public offering as early as this year. "You have ChatGPT, a 1bn-user business growing 50-100 per cent a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?" said one early backer of OpenAI. "It's a deeply unfocused company." OpenAI's leadership is bullish, having already successfully repositioned the company multiple times. Chief executive Sam Altman is fresh from securing $122bn last month from more than 25 blue-chip investors including SoftBank, Amazon, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Thrive Capital. "The suggestion that investors are not supportive of our strategy defies the facts," said Sarah Friar, OpenAI's chief financial officer. "Our . . . raise, the largest in history, was oversubscribed, completed in record time and backed by a broad set of global investors, reflecting strong conviction in both our direction, current business momentum and long-term value." The runaway success of Anthropic has precipitated a strategic rethink. The Claude-maker's annualised revenue surged from $9bn at the end of 2025 to $30bn at the end of March, driven by demand for its coding tools. Anthropic's business appears to have leapfrogged OpenAI, which hit $25bn in annualised revenue in February, though the companies use different accounting methods to book revenue, making direct comparison difficult. Denise Dresser, OpenAI's new chief revenue officer, accused Anthropic of overstating their revenue "by roughly $8bn" by "grossing up [revenue] share with Amazon and Google", in a note to staff on Sunday. Both companies claim to use standard accounting practices. Anthropic "recognises gross revenue on sales through partners because it is the principal in the transaction and its cloud partners are the distribution channel", said one person close to the company. Dresser acknowledged Anthropic's "coding focus gave them an early wedge" in the race for enterprise customers. But, she added, "the market is ours to win". The two start-ups are both losing billions of dollars each year, spending aggressively on computing power to train and run models. One investor who has backed both companies said that in order to underwrite an investment in OpenAI's recent round, they would have to assume an IPO valuation of $1.2tn or more. That has become harder to justify given the cheaper proposition of buying into Anthropic, most recently valued at $380bn. The person added OpenAI risked being left "in no man's land". Data from secondary marketplaces that trade proxies for both companies' stock suggests demand is higher for Anthropic, and, for the first time, buyers are placing a premium on the start-up over OpenAI. "There's room for both but there is fundamentally a number 1 and a number 2 dynamic and the 1 will win disproportionately. We picked. We invested a lot into Anthropic," said Roy Luo, a partner at Iconiq Capital, which has invested over $1bn into Anthropic and owns a smaller stake in OpenAI. "Anthropic are enjoying their time in the sun, and we're being congratulated," he added. "But everyone was saying the same to OpenAI's early investors last year." OpenAI still retains a lead among consumer users. Having beaten its rivals to launch ChatGPT in November 2022, it catalysed the creation of a new market for data centre financing, converted into a for-profit enterprise and committed hundreds of billions to secure computing power. But Altman issued a "code red" late last year imploring staff to focus on core business. Last month, Fidji Simo, former Instacart chief and OpenAI's CEO of applications, who is off on medical leave, urged employees to drop "side quests". Two weeks later the company spent in the "low hundreds of millions of dollars" on tech talk show TBPN. An OpenAI executive said the show was not a side quest because it doesn't drain computing resources. "I don't get it frankly, it doesn't make any sense to me," said an OpenAI investor of the TBPN acquisition. "It's a distraction and it irks me." Disney's planned investment of $1bn evaporated as OpenAI shuttered the video generation service Sora. Microsoft has indicated it will take legal action if OpenAI's new $50bn partnership with Amazon infringes on its exclusive cloud deal with the company. Ambitions around Stargate, OpenAI's $500bn data centre effort announced in the White House last year, have also shifted. Plans to develop a $30bn data centre in the UK and extend a site in Abilene, Texas, have both been ditched. A $100bn deal with Nvidia has also been substantially pared back. Expansion continues in other areas. OpenAI plans to nearly double its headcount to 8,000 by the end of the year, at which point it expects to generate half of its revenue from businesses, up from about 40 per cent today. On Monday, OpenAI said it had signed a lease for a new permanent office in London next year, where it wants to form the largest research hub outside the US. It also spent last year inking massive deals to secure computing resources -- an area where it has a clear advantage over Anthropic. The company told investors last week that it had secured access to 8 gigawatts of computing capacity -- a milestone OpenAI claims that Anthropic will not hit until the end of 2027 -- as it aims to secure 30GW by the end of 2030. Anthropic has faced outages and power constraints. Meanwhile, according to a person involved in OpenAI's infrastructure efforts, "even if our model is less good, we can just serve it". Anthropic has not shared its plans to add computing power, but chief financial officer Krishna Rao said this month the company would take a "disciplined approach to scaling infrastructure". OpenAI is reallocating its own computing resources. As well as dropping Sora, it has also mothballed an "adult" chatbot. Instead, its focus has switched to selling its coding tool, Codex, to businesses. Multiple people familiar with the company's strategy said Codex might eventually take precedence over ChatGPT, as staff prioritise making the software more accessible for non-technical users. "It's just a much higher margin business and moving compute [computing resources] from consumer to enterprise is trivial," said the person who has worked on OpenAI's efforts to access computing resources. "The company was doing too many things, it had too many bets. It's about refocusing the business around a couple of core bets," said another major investor in the group. "That's it. You can't as a company compete on 30 different fronts." Others see frequent switches of approach as a sign of strategic drift. Jai Das, president of investment firm Sapphire Ventures, described OpenAI as "the Netscape of AI", referring to the once dominant internet company before being outstripped by Microsoft and acquired by AOL. Das is not an investor in either OpenAI or Anthropic. Friar said the company still had the support of its investors given that OpenAI just closed the biggest private fundraising of all time. The CFO said the $122bn raising "gives us a lot of flexibility at this moment in time. I view my job as always [to create] max flexibility, max optionality for the company, because then we can make more strategic decisions." Data visualisation by Clara Murray, additional reporting by Cristina Criddle

OpenAI's $852 billion valuation is under scrutiny from its own investors

Some backers say OpenAI has revised its product roadmap twice in six months and risks losing focus ahead of an IPO expected as early as Q4 2026. OpenAI's new CRO has accused Anthropic of overstating its $30B run rate by $8B through gross accounting on cloud partner revenue. Both companies say they follow standard accounting practices. OpenAI's $852 billion valuation is facing scrutiny from some of its own investors as the company pivots its strategy towards the enterprise market, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. The concerns centre on a period of visible strategic turbulence: OpenAI has revised its product roadmap twice in six months, first in response to competitive pressure from Google and then from Anthropic, and has recently dropped several initiatives including its Sora video generation rollout and an 'adult' chatbot. Some investors told the FT the rapid changes could leave the company vulnerable to Anthropic and a resurgent Google, even as it prepares for a potential initial public offering as early as the fourth quarter of 2026. The criticism is pointed. One early backer of OpenAI told the FT: "You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100 per cent a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code? It's a deeply unfocused company." Jai Das, president of Sapphire Ventures, who is not an investor in either OpenAI or Anthropic, went further, describing OpenAI to the FT as "the Netscape of AI", comparing it to the once-dominant browser company that was eventually outflanked by Microsoft and absorbed by AOL. One investor who has backed both companies told that in order to underwrite OpenAI's most recent funding round, they would need to assume an IPO valuation of $1.2 trillion or more. OpenAI's leadership pushed back firmly. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar pointed to the $122 billion fundraise completed last month, described as the largest private round in Silicon Valley history, backed by SoftBank, Amazon, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital, among more than 25 investors, as evidence of investor confidence. "The suggestion that investors are not supportive of our strategy defies the facts," Friar said. "Our raise, the largest in history, was oversubscribed, completed in record time and backed by a broad set of global investors." Separately, Friar told CNBC that enterprise now accounts for 40% of OpenAI's total revenue and is on track to match its consumer business by the end of 2026. OpenAI is also targeting 30 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2030 and told investors last week it had already secured 8 gigawatts, a level it claims Anthropic will not reach until the end of 2027. At the heart of the competitive anxiety is Anthropic's revenue trajectory. The Claude-maker's annualised run rate surged from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by the end of March 2026, driven largely by demand for its coding tools. OpenAI, by its own account, hit $25 billion in annualised revenue in February. The apparent gap prompted a notably aggressive response from OpenAI's new chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, hired in December 2025 from the role of CEO of Slack. In an internal memo sent to staff on Sunday, Dresser accused Anthropic of overstating its run rate by roughly $8 billion. The accusation turns on a well-documented accounting difference: Anthropic books the full value of revenue generated through its cloud distribution partners, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, on a gross basis, while OpenAI reports its Microsoft revenue share on a net basis, deducting the partner's share before recognising it. Both approaches are permissible under US GAAP. The difference, if Dresser's analysis is correct, would put Anthropic's comparable run rate closer to $22 billion rather than $30 billion. Anthropic disputed the characterisation. One person close to the company told the FT that Anthropic "recognises gross revenue on sales through partners because it is the principal in the transaction and its cloud partners are the distribution channel", a standard justification for gross recognition under accounting rules. Dresser's memo acknowledged that Anthropic's "coding focus gave them an early wedge" in enterprise, but argued that a narrow, developer-focused positioning becomes a liability as AI expands beyond engineering teams. "You do not want to be a single-product company in a platform war," the memo stated. The memo also outlined OpenAI's Q2 priorities: winning the enterprise model layer with a new model codenamed 'Spud', establishing its Frontier agent platform, expanding through a recently announced Amazon partnership, and building a deployment engine called DeployCo.

OpenAI Backers Question Valuation Amid Anthropic Competition | PYMNTS.com

As the Financial Times (FT) reported Tuesday (April 14), this growing scrutiny comes amid OpenAI's new focus on enterprise customers and dealing with competition from rival artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic. In the past few months, OpenAI has made a series of moves to further a new strategy, one that involves sustaining ChatGPT's place as the dominant consumer AI product, while also competing with Anthropic for corporate customers. However, some OpenAI investors say these changes could leave the company vulnerable to Anthropic and Google as it prepares to go public. "You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100 per cent a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?" one early investor in OpenAI told the FT. "It's a deeply unfocused company." The report added that OpenAI leadership remains confident, having already gone through numerous successful pivots. CEO Sam Altman last month landed $122 billion in funding from high-profile investors that included SoftBank, Amazon and Nvidia. "The suggestion that investors are not supportive of our strategy defies the facts," said Sarah Friar, OpenAI's chief financial officer. "Our . . . raise, the largest in history, was oversubscribed, completed in record time and backed by a broad set of global investors, reflecting strong conviction in both our direction, current business momentum and long-term value." The report also includes a comment from an investor who has backed both OpenAI and Anthripic, who said that to underwrite an investment in OpenAI's recent round, they would have to assume an IPO valuation of at least $1.2 trillion. That has become harder to defend considering the cheaper proposition of buying into Anthropic, most recently valued at $380 billion, the FT said. The investor added that OpenAI was in danger of being left "in no man's land." Writing about competition between the various AI platforms last week, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster argued that this race will be determined more by how user habits are formed than by product releases, and by "whether the platforms understand that they aren't just competing for users, but for the order in which those users show up at their prompt." "The consumer who opens ChatGPT before she's had her coffee isn't likely to be pulled away by a better feature set alone," Webster added. "If she changes her behavior at all, it will be because another model earns a specific role in her routine."

OpenAI's $852 bln valuation faces scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports By Investing.com

Investing.com-- OpenAI's lofty valuation is facing growing scrutiny from some of its own investors as the company pivots strategy and intensifies competition in the artificial intelligence sector, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing investors. The group, valued at about $852 billion, is increasingly shifting focus toward enterprise customers while aiming to defend the dominance of its ChatGPT platform among consumers, even as it faces rising pressure from rival Anthropic, according to the FT report. Get real-time updates on market-moving news with InvestingPro Some investors told the FT that the strategic repositioning could leave OpenAI exposed, particularly as it prepares for a potential initial public offering as early as this year. Concerns have also been raised over what one early backer described as a lack of focus, given the company's strong consumer growth, the report said. The shift comes as Anthropic's annualised revenue surged to about $30 billion by March, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025, driven by demand for its coding tools. By comparison, OpenAI reached roughly $25 billion in annualised revenue in February, though accounting differences make direct comparisons difficult, the FT reported. OpenAI executives defended the strategy, with finance chief Sarah Friar saying the company's recent $122 billion funding round reflected strong investor backing. Still, some investors warned that intensifying competition and evolving priorities could complicate OpenAI's growth trajectory, the report added.