How Anthropic leapfrogged arch rival OpenAI to a near-$1 trillion valuation

OpenAI, on the other hand, has focused more on consumer adoption, building a massive user base around ChatGPT, and expanding into search, productivity and multimodal AI. OpenAI, too, is now focusing on enterprise AI through the recently announced OpenAI Deployment Company that will embed engineers directly inside enterprises to help redesign workflows, automate operations and build custom AI systems around OpenAI’s technology. 

The latest valuation, however, suggests that investors increasingly believe Anthropic has taken the lead in the commercial AI race. Rapid enterprise adoption, explosive revenue growth and deep partnerships with cloud providers such as Amazon have helped the company close the gap with OpenAI and, at least in valuation terms, move ahead of the firm that sparked the generative AI boom. OpenAI, though, is said to be planning for a possible public listing that some reports value at close to $1 trillion. 

The OpenAI vs Anthropic rivalry 

Rivalries have defined every era of technology — Apple vs Samsung, Boeing vs Airbus, Windows vs MacOS. The AI race, too, has been largely shaped by the OpenAI and Anthropic competition, though Google and Meta are in the race as well.

Behind the rivalry are two factors — a contrasting approach to AI development and the relationship between their founders. 

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei was once a senior OpenAI employee, leading the development of large language models such as GPT-2 and GPT-3 at OpenAI. He began to feel, however, that the technology needed to be developed more responsibly.

In 2020, he left OpenAI over differences about the company’s approach to AI safety. A year later, he started Anthropic along with his sister Daniela and a group of former OpenAI employees.

The two companies were increasingly associated with different paths: OpenAI with speed of development and commercialisation, and Anthropic with safety and security.

Anthropic also ran an advertisement campaign during the Super Bowl championship in the US earlier this year, taking a dig at OpenAI’s plans to introduce ads in ChatGPT.

One ad featured a young man in a park attempting pull-ups, who asks a muscular bystander about achieving six-pack abs. The man starts with a detailed, robotic response, like an AI chatbot, before spewing out an ad for “StepBoost Max” insoles. Anthropic ran another 60-second spot in which a man asks, “how can I communicate better with my mother?”. A chatbot disguised as a therapist gives him advice before pivoting into pushing products instead. The ads concluded with the tagline “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

All this bad blood played out publicly at the India AI Summit this year, when Altman and Amodei avoided holding hands during a group picture with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, even though other AI leaders did so.

A small circle

The connections between the two companies are not unique. As The Indian Express recently explained, the world’s most consequential artificial intelligence research is being conducted by a strikingly small circle of scientists who studied mostly under the same mentors, taught in the same rooms and kept recruiting from each other’s labs.

After the e-commerce website eBay acquired the fintech company PayPal in 2002, a close-knit group of former PayPal founders and employees — that included Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman — went on to found or fund many of Silicon Valley’s most influential companies. Their ventures include YouTube, LinkedIn, Tesla, Yelp, SpaceX and Palantir.

OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk (who later left the board), Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman. Thiel was the main backer and mentor of Altman, providing a large part of the $5 million that made up Altman’s initial venture fund. When OpenAI launched in 2015, Thiel was one of the founding investors pledging $1 billion.

The most notable startups founded by OpenAI alumni include the San Francisco-based Anthropic. It has rapidly grown to become OpenAI’s biggest rival.

Additionally, the themes central to the divide between the companies have also appeared within OpenAI in the recent past. Its co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, left OpenAI in May 2024 after he was reportedly part of a failed 2023 coup to replace Altman, stemming from concerns about safety in the development of AI. However, OpenAI employees rallied behind Altman, leading to his reinstatement.

Shortly afterwards, Sutskever co-founded Safe Superintelligence. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, left OpenAI last year to found Thinking Machines Lab, which emerged in February 2025. Aravind Srinivas worked as a research scientist at OpenAI for a year until 2022, when he left the company to co-found AI search engine Perplexity.

Google DeepMind is a major “founder factory” in the AI industry, with over 200 former employees having gone on to establish their own startups, with OpenAI coming in a close second. Its co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is now CEO of Microsoft AI.