OpenAI raises $11B at a $1.25T valuation

How many companies have a public market valuation over 1T, that seems like a lot

• jordanb · 14 hours ago

  It's cheap if you buy the story that they're building a digital god to rule us all.

• rbinv · 14 hours ago

  About 14: Apple ($4.98T), NVIDIA ($4.51T), Microsoft ($3.94T), Alphabet ($3.49T), Amazon ($2.80T), TSMC ($1.95T), SpaceX ($1.82T), Saudi Aramco ($1.69T), Meta ($1.56T), Tesla ($1.42T), Broadcom ($1.40T), Berkshire Hathaway ($1.22T), Eli Lilly ($1.21T), (Walmart ($0.996T))

  • ozgung · 14 hours ago

    I remember Apple being the first ever one-trillion-dollar company in the world. It was in 2018.

    • fakedang · 13 hours ago

      Aramco was the first in 2016. But Aramco basically only has 2.5% free float on the market. Apple was the first with a near 100% free float on the market.

  • TacticalCoder · 14 hours ago

    So basically the equivalent of the entire US GDP in those 14 companies + OpenAI and Anthropic at a $1T valuation or so. 16 companies with a market cap as big as the entire US GDP. Make is make sense when 15 out of those 16 are US companies. Back in, say, 2006, twenty years ago, there weren't 15 companies adding up to the entirety of the US GDP. Something simply doesn't add up.

    • cobbzilla · 13 hours ago

      Isn’t that kind of apples and oranges? Market cap and GDP are both measured in currency units, I guess they have that in common, not sure I understand the usefulness of this comparison.

      • scarmig · 13 hours ago

        GDP is more like a currency/time unit, though.

        • cobbzilla · 13 hours ago

          Agreed; apples and oranges

      • sseagull · 13 hours ago

        To me it’s more about the scale of these numbers. After billions, people (like me) kind of lose intuition about how gigantic these numbers actually are. Yes GDP has time in its unit, but it still gives a general idea of the size.

• Hendrikto · 14 hours ago

  1T isn‘t what it used to be. Inflation is exponetial.

• lgl · 12 hours ago

  Just remember guys, it's mostly Monopoly money. They do not care about you. Their dreams and promises are from the bubble they live in. Do not worship these men or these companies.

The story here is that Sam wanted to raise a lot more, but could not. Investors almost certainly want to see how the Anthropic IPO plays out before deciding whether to keep showering these companies with money.

• naveen99 · 14 hours ago

  Sam raised a $100B in previous round. I think a direct listing ipo would see their valuation go up to $4T, and then they could do some at the market sales as needed.

  • freecodeio · 14 hours ago

    why not just value it at 40T if we're all just throwing numbers randomly

    • ares623 · 13 hours ago

      The first $1 bajillion company

  • satvikpendem · 14 hours ago

    They didn't actually raise that 100 billion fully, tranches were contingent on different factors, some of which haven't even been hit yet.

  • bagacrap · 12 hours ago

    Ok, give me $1000 dollars for a stake in OpenAi at a $4T valuation and I will deliver you .000000025% of the company in stock when they go public.

• bushbaba · 14 hours ago

  Valuation wouldn’t hold if public. He couldn’t raise the 30B he wanted. I’m not sure how much runway OpenAI has, but sounds like a similar to Anthropic story with valuation likely if in the public markets declining.

This valuation is a function of early accumulation of compute. They could rent it to Anthropic, or poach more Anthropic engineers.

• fancyfredbot · 14 hours ago

  Not sure how long you'll be able to sell compute to anthropic for. They are constrained right now but they have an insane pipeline of take or pay contracts, and if those are delivered they'll be drowning in compute in a couple of years time.

• raincole · 14 hours ago

  Anthropic has a higher valuation than OpenAI.

  • nullc · 14 hours ago

    Not for long.

    • raincole · 13 hours ago

      ? Are you implying there will be something that affects investors' confidence to Anthropic, and somehow OpenAI will be immune to that?

      • nullc · 10 hours ago

        It's not my opinion, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-11-06/anthropic... I think Anthropic is worth far less... but it's looking like they may attempt to raise at a valuation betwen 1.1 and 1.2tn.

  • paxy · 13 hours ago

    There was news just yesterday that investors are lowering Anthropic's IPO target to around $1.1T, so no.

• ianm218 · 14 hours ago

  Do you think they would actually sell compute to anthropic? Relative to working with other labs that feels like conceding the overall AI race atleast outside of consumer.

  • naveen99 · 13 hours ago

    They could just do it through azure or aws. Also, at these numbers a pseudo merger between OpenAI and Anthropic could happen. There is no anti trust anymore. It’s all the same owners for all these companies… the only anti trust is between usa, Russia, Europe, China, and the middle powers.

They wanted to raise 20 billion "from family offices and high net-worth individuals", i.e., fleece the Saudis again but failed: https://www.wheresyoured.at/running-dry/ They got a bit of pocket change at this insane valuation.

• ifwinterco · 14 hours ago

  The Saudis have one or two other things on their minds right now that take precedence over Sam Altman

  • ReptileMan · 13 hours ago

    Who knew that a drone rammed into Saudi Aramco headquarters would be so distracting.

I think OpenAI is one of the most important companies in a generation, but on a tangent, I remember the first time a company broke a $1T market cap, and it was a significant moment. Nowadays multi-trillion-dollar valuations are becoming more common — I wonder how much it reflects inflation vs companies being genuinely bigger than they used to be. If it’s more about inflation, then we can expect to see dozens and hundreds more in the coming decades. Founders: recalibrate your ambition for the new era.

• Hendrikto · 14 hours ago

  It is pretty much all inflation. Just look at the gold price over the same time frame. Gold did not become more productive or scarce. In fact, we have more of it now than we ever had.

• 233mhz · 14 hours ago

  > I remember the first time a company broke a $1T market cap, and it was a significant moment But then again 1T today is 700b back in 2018. It's like 6 figures salaries, they don't hit like they used to.

• kortilla · 14 hours ago

  Half inflation, half hype. 2018 when Apple was first across the threshold, it’s P/E was around 20. Currently near 40. Then inflation has cut the dollar in half in a bunch of categories. So that would put it at $4T with no growth at all. Another way to look at it would be to think of this openAI news as announcing they have a $250B valuation if you’re fixated on pre-covid prices like I am. :)

  • ninkendo · 12 hours ago

    The fed should put the S&P 500 in the CPI basket of goods for inflation calculation. I’m only half joking.

• gradus_ad · 13 hours ago

  It's inflation, and it's an important lesson as to the dynamics of financial markets in the context of a high debt regime. Regardless of what officials say, the only way out of the looming debt crisis in developed nations is to turn on the money printers and inflate the debt away. That's literally the only way out. Next look at how concentrated inflation gains become in financial assets. Corporate valuations are the first thing to inflate (wages last, and at a much lower rate especially as you move down the income ladder). Finally recognize that the concentration of wealth in the stock market has made the market itself too big to fail, meaning central bank intervention whenever things get too gruesome. Enter moral hazard at the government backstopped casino. All of this leads to one conclusion: put all of your money in the stock market. Literally just buy the S&P, ideally a 2x levered S&P index ETF given historical studies of optimal leverage, and just let it ride...

The real headline is that they couldn’t hit what they wanted in terms of valuation and funds raised. Just were not enough people willing to invest given concerns that it may be downhill from here for a while on AI. This will also make it even harder to avoid any future IPO being a down round. They’re almost certainly worth much less than Anthropic and Anthropic is, per reports, struggling to keep its valuation much above 1T, and even that may fall through.

• onlyrealcuzzo · 14 hours ago

  The bigger story is that their burn rate is so high. Unless things change considerably, this is less than a 6 month runway. It's not common for raises to give you this little runway. You could read into it that they expect to IPO in far less than that amount of time, and this is a short bridge until then.

  • nostrademons · 13 hours ago

    I do expect them to IPO in ~6 months - they were planning to IPO in 2026Q4 but they torpedoed those plans, and Sam Altman said it's off the table for the rest of 2026. The implication is that it's on the table for 2027Q1. Interest rates are the big wildcard. If this is the start of a significant rising cycle, akin to 2022/2023, then the AI bubble is toast and all these companies are dead. If the Fed pauses in December/January there may be a window of opportunity in early 2027 and we'll see both OpenAI and Anthropic IPO and possibly jump. Rising interest rates are a triple whammy to AI companies: 1) risk capital always flees first when rates go up, so the available capital dries up 2) they and their suppliers have borrowed significantly to fund datacenter expansion, so rising rates will directly increase their expenses and 3) AI is considered an investment for their customers , and corporate finance always pulls back on more speculative investments when rates go up, and so their customers will likely pull back and directly shrink their revenue.

    • enraged_camel · 13 hours ago

      >> I do expect them to IPO in ~6 months - they were planning to IPO in 2026Q4 but they torpedoed those plans, and Sam Altman said it's off the table for the rest of 2026. The implication is that it's on the table for 2027Q1. Whether they IPO depends on a lot of factors. For example, if we see a market meltdown triggered by data center moratoriums, then neither lab will IPO in 2027 at the very least. And if Anthropic achieves RSI first, there won't be much investor interest in a clearly inferior lab.

      • metalspot · 12 hours ago

        RSI has already been achieved, but it is not the infinite wealth, eternal life, ending all disease fantasies, and there is no monopoly, just more intense competition as everyone is capable of replicating it, so bad news for that investment thesis.

        • malfist · 11 hours ago

          I would think an RSI could count the number of R's in strawberry

  • metalspot · 12 hours ago

    This would by my question. Why do they need money at all after just raising 9 months ago? But none of these numbers are real. Softbank and MGX are re-arranging the deck chairs between OpenAI and Stargate so the actual new outside money here indicates very weak demand. This is a press release to try to anchor the valuation but it doesn't seem like a lot of people are buying that.

  • outside1234 · 12 hours ago

    But if it was a real, functioning business, that you'd expect in an IPO, then they wouldn't need a raise to bridge there?

• admax88qqq · 14 hours ago

  > They’re almost certainly worth much less than Anthropic What makes you say this?

  • conception · 14 hours ago

    Anthropic has had a laser focus on Enterprise features whereas Chatgpt is much more consumer focus.

    • jfckenfishf · 13 hours ago

      Is anyone actually using those features? I feel like this still very much just Codex vs Claude code, and if codex has the better model everyone will switch in a week. All the other products feels like a (desperate?) attempt to create moat and friction for switching models.

      • esikich · 13 hours ago

        Yes, they are. You don't just give 1000 employees a subscription and tell them they can have as many tokens as they want.

      • SV_BubbleTime · 13 hours ago

        I feel like all these versus arguments are absolutely opinion and preference, but really deep down do hint at a modification that will be hard to ignore as an investor. If AMD and Nvidia could make the exact same thing the exact same rates, why would the stock price of one be higher than the other?

    • raincole · 12 hours ago

      Apple is very consumer focus and it has the highest marketcap ever.

  • kylec · 14 hours ago

    Coding agents are the most profitable application of AI at the moment, and Anthropic has the most widely used one

    • dofm · 12 hours ago

      s/most/only/, cross fingers , make test

    • fallingbananna · 11 hours ago

      But it's relatively easy to switch from one to the other. And in terms of capabilities and pricing they are not *that* different. So I can't imagine one company being vastly more valuable than the other one (unless their spending or long term strategy is vastly different).

  • judge2020 · 14 hours ago

    Developer sentiment seems to be awarding Anthropic on quality and efficiency with more usage (plus Claude Code CLI being earlier to market), although maybe OpenAI is in bed with enough non-coding enterprises that it has an edge there. But Anthropic might not actually be worth more that much more than OpenAI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50394906

    • sekai · 12 hours ago

      > Developer sentiment seems to be awarding Anthropic on quality and efficiency with more usage Developer sentiment is irrelevant in the eyes of the normies

  • karmakaze · 13 hours ago

    For me OpenAI doesn't have any stickiness/moat. I only use it because Sol 6.1 tokens are cheaper for similar quality for typical tasks. I also find it can be hit-or-miss more so than others when designing a system interactively.

  • rubikscube09 · 13 hours ago

    I use openai models for math, but that's an infinitesimal market

  • enraged_camel · 12 hours ago

    Opus 5.5 came out more than a month and a half ago and is the clear favorite amongst developers, and OpenAI has yet to release something that can match or exceed it. That means they don't have their ducks in a row, and the internal models they do have take too long to prepare for general release.

• bluecalm · 14 hours ago

  I would be shocked if Anthropic IPOs below 1.25T. Prediction markets have it at 1.625T now. Even quite conservative Aswath Damodaran puts it at 1.45T. I think once you go below that you can probably just sell on open market without any IPO dance like finding institutional investors.

  • runarberg · 14 hours ago

    Prediction markets are famously never wrong. Less sarcastically though the bet on how much AI company IPO at attracts a certain type of people. People who may have a certain believe about AI companies which will bias their assumptions quite a bit.

    • xvector · 14 hours ago

      I mean unless you think the valuation multiple on AI companies have compressed by over 50% in the past week, the prediction markets seem pretty accurate. OpenAI will be just fine, they are building superintelligence. I think these comments will be pretty funny in a few years. This is the best wealth building opportunity of my generation.

      • r_lee · 12 hours ago

        will they be able to monopolize it though?

        • xvector · 12 hours ago

          Even if it's restricted to a few companies there's still a fuckton of money to be made. 4 companies capturing ever-increasing slices of the world economy.

      • folkrav · 12 hours ago

        Jesus, is HN really buying into that “superintelligence” newspeak?

        • xvector · 12 hours ago

          Calling superintelligence "newspeak" is proof you don't really understand what you're talking about. This is not a new concept and has been discussed extensively for about two decades. This has nothing to to with the recent EO, it has been known for some time that the labs are racing towards ASI. Because this is not a topic you're familiar with, I would recommend some light reading on it before returning to the topic and commenting on it with such confidence. A good starting point would be reading some of the perspectives of some of the people that built the modern LLM. I promise you they understand the technology and its potential better than you, and were discussing these things well before it was even a concept in your mind.

          • folkrav · 12 hours ago

            Treating people like uninformed idiots for disagreeing with your choice of language. Cute. Executive order 14434 sure did a number on some of y’all. Edit: sneaky edit bud. The term existing for a while doesn’t make the uptick in use of said term since the EO, right before trillion+ IPOs, to describe what the frontier labs are building, less of a “funny” coincidence. The people you tell me I should listen to standing to make big bucks on me believing them makes it, at the very least, ever so slightly suspicious.

      • timacles · 12 hours ago

        > they are building superintelligence There are no serious people left who believe this anymore

    • bluecalm · 13 hours ago

      Prediction markets are sometimes wrong but they are very accurate on high volume markets like this one. Here we have hyperliquid perpetual futures among other things. Volume on those alone is above 10M USD per day. >>Less sarcastically though the bet on how much AI company IPO at attracts a certain type of people. People who may have a certain believe about AI companies which will bias their assumptions quite a bit. Yeah but there is also someone on the other side.

      • dofm · 12 hours ago

        > but they are very accurate on high volume markets like this one But this number isn't a matter of market volume, is it? It's a matter of what analysts, regulators, banks, and investors choose. And they appear to not be that keen on a valuation that high, judging by the press.

        • jmb99 · 12 hours ago

          In theory though that’s the whole point of the prediction markets. If all analysts truly believe (with conviction) that the number should be <1.2T, then they can put their money where their mouth is in the prediction market that’s currently overshooting their predictions by 20-40%. If they don’t have much conviction, then maybe the stories in the media aren’t their true beliefs or they’re trying to push a narrative.

          • dofm · 12 hours ago

            Why does HN have this "if they won't bet on it, they don't believe it" mindset? In quite a lot of sectors, gambling on a prediction market for an outcome you can influence is frowned upon, unethical, even illegal. To be clear, I am talking about the investment analysts who have a role in setting the IPO price, which is a (then-private) decision, not an outcome of a market. It would almost certainly be a crime for the analysts involved in pricing an IPO to make prediction market bets.

      • xyzzy_plugh · 12 hours ago

        They're not very accurate. They are generally accurate with a margin of error big enough that they're far from a sure thing. If they were accurate then no one would take a contrarian position. I'd look at a prediction and say "well obviously the favored side is going to win" and put all my money there, over and over again, until I was the richest mortal in the universe. Polymarket has it at ~50% that their IPO value is between 1.25T and 1.5T. Do you think that is representative of reality? It's not like we get to flip the IPO coin ten times.

        • bluecalm · 12 hours ago

          >>If they were accurate then no one would take a contrarian position. Sure, the price is the weighted average of expectations. People take either side for many reasons though. There would still be a lot of training in a perfectly efficient market because people and institutions have their own utility of money functions and other reasons to take bets (hedging their vesting stock for example). >>. I'd look at a prediction and say "well obviously the favored side is going to win" and put all my money there, over and over again, until I was the richest mortal in the universe. >>Polymarket has it at ~50% that their IPO value is between 1.25T and 1.5T. Do you think that is representative of reality? It's not like we get to flip the IPO coin ten times. Yeah, it's the best guess we have. >> It's not like we get to flip the IPO coin ten times. That's very limited frequentist perspective. Just because you can't re-run the experiment doesn't mean you can't assign probabilities to events.

          • malfist · 11 hours ago

            > That's very limited frequentist perspective. Just because you can't re-run the experiment doesn't mean you can't assign probabilities to events One time events have no probability, they happened exactly as they happened and no outer outcome can be assigned probability besides 0

      • ambicapter · 10 hours ago

        Who wants to get on the other side of delusional investors with deep pockets?

  • dofm · 12 hours ago

    Prediction markets may say that — investors and analysts appear to be saying that $1.2T is a reach.

• ftchd · 14 hours ago

  OpenAI is a bit more scattered brained and spread across multiple products. Anthropic is way more focused. That helps in a way that builds upon another: their product tends to be better and the people's perception of it as well. But "much less"? OpenAI needs a month or two of good choices, progress & announcements, and that flips. On the other hand, Deepseek could blow both out of the water unexpectedly, ending the argument about who has the superior tech. There's also the Elon factor. Anthropic has a good relationship with Elon (to the point where he discounted the compute sold to them by quite a lot) while OpenAI/Sama is the devil to him.

  • tsunamifury · 13 hours ago

    What if I asserted that the MCP economy could be worth 5x more than LLM market since tools usually end up just being a fraction of the opportunity compared to market domination.

    • ftchd · 13 hours ago

      You would probably be wrong, but I have no idea, all of this is science fiction compared to 2015. How could anything be bigger than Super Intelligence? Which is supposed to be the next step after AGI, which we presumably already have? I'm tired boss...

      • ben_w · 13 hours ago

        > How could anything else be bigger than Super Intelligence? Which is supposed to be the next step after AGI, which we presumably already have? Meh. We both do and don't have AGI, because everyone before ChatGPT thought it was obvious what it meant and it turned out we all disagreed with each other about that obvious meaning. We can't even all agree about the "artificial" part, which is the most surprising part to me, let alone "general" or "intelligence".

      • m0llusk · 13 hours ago

        Quantum intelligence maybe?

        • adrianN · 13 hours ago

          What is that even supposed to be?

          • stymaar · 13 hours ago

            Whatever pumps the stock price.

        • ftchd · 13 hours ago

          Not until 2028, AGI/SI still brings in money

      • tsunamifury · 13 hours ago

        If you applied some thinking for a moment and not spiraled out you probably would realize the the tools that control a market are worth less to sell themselves then to utilize them.

        • ftchd · 13 hours ago

          If only..

          • tsunamifury · 13 hours ago

            I’m sorry what? Google invented cloud computing and instead cornered the web economy worth much much more over the past 20 years

    • eddythompson80 · 12 hours ago

      Maybe. The problem with the MCP economy is that it's not clear yet what shape it can take. If it takes the shape of API integration solutions, then it won't be 5x. If it takes the shape of an App Store, then yes. I think arguments for either direction are valid. On one hand, MCPs are essentially APIs used by developers. Developers will demand some form of open reusable standard, "MCP gateways" or hosts will spring up to host them, hyperscaleres will offer them, and ultimately it will be another cloud commodity. On the other hand, some of the target users of MCPs is the consumer market rather than the developer market. An App Store model makes sense there and the provider/platform can collect the lucrative 30% cut and end consumers’ numbers makes for massive revenue opportunity. This dictates a walled garden "Agent" like Muse or Instant. If #1 is the direction the market goes in, then more batteries-included solutions like Muse or Hermes become the next obvious step up the chain. If #2 wins, then yes having your MCP available to on a Muse App Store that Meta takes a cut of some sort would be larger.

  • dofm · 13 hours ago

    > Anthropic is way more focused. That helps in a way that builds upon another: their product tends to be better and the people's perception of it as well. But they are still not likely to be investment-grade at IPO.

    • andriy_koval · 7 hours ago

      mostly because they got all those 500B hardware commitments on balance sheet. Without them they have best coding/other(e.g. most accountants prefer claude) model on the market, with solid increasing revenue channels and loyal customer base.

    • YetAnotherNick · 5 hours ago

      > investment-grade Does it mean something or is it a new buzzword. I am seeing this everywhere and the traditional meaning applied to bonds doesn't apply here.

      • dofm · 4 hours ago

        https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/wall-street... Blackstone think that post-IPO Anthropic will start out with a junk credit rating. FT seemingly covered it too if you can see it (I can’t): https://www.ft.com/content/59383c7f-8d82-493f-bf01-d2e862a10...

  • syspec · 12 hours ago

    I disagree with this, most normies will never use Claude code... but they WILL use ChatGPTs various modes and apps that handle a lot of things for them. Their recent "intelligent ui" (forget what they call it), which turns the chat almost into a magazine is amazing for people when they start doing measuring or responses comeback as little graphs or diagrams showing this or that. Claude is still not able to generate pixel images. I agree Claude is better for the likes of you and I, but I see the opposite in non-technical people which is most people

    • rafaelmn · 12 hours ago

      Who says selling to "normies" is a value proposition in the first place ? if we're heading towards a K shaped economy - being mass market is a bad thing, and serving professionals and top of the curve is where there's money to be made. The only money in this market so far is in selling to megacorps and governments. Also Google will eat them eventually in mass market part as well.

    • nylonstrung · 12 hours ago

      Normie consumers will probably not ever spend more than $15/mo on LLMs as they exist currently if they would spend money at all so their LTV will probably just turn into race to the bottom performance marketing Devs and the token-consuming services they create are probably a more valuable market than the entirety of the glorified search engine use cases that the average consumer is focused on

      • stogot · 11 hours ago

        Yes, on one hand OpenAI pursued consumers (and as meta found this is capped) and antrhopic pursued enterprise

      • andriy_koval · 7 hours ago

        > consumers will probably not ever spend more than $15/mo on LLMs they will easily generate Ads and shopping recommendations revenue challenging Google's 300B/y Ads empire.

    • IsTom · 12 hours ago

      How much tokens can "normies" use? Use with regular chat or document processing is tiny compared to what coding can consume.

      • randomNumber7 · 12 hours ago

        You can make much more money of them since they just uncritically belief whatever the AI tells them. Noone will sell them tokens, they will be shepherded into buying stuff (like now with ads, just better).

        • kaffekaka · 11 hours ago

          I suppose you are too smart to be manipulated?

        • johannes1234321 · 9 hours ago

          You can get a bunch of small-value contracts requiring a notable amount of work to deal with complaints and outstanding payments. The alternative are fewer but a lot more high value contracts.

  • nylonstrung · 12 hours ago

    >OpenAI is a bit more scattered brained and spread across multiple products. I wonder what came of the Jony Ive acquisition that was supposed to yield a physical product

    • ftchd · 8 hours ago

      Not sure, but in the meantime they removed the option to right click "Open in new tab" on the "New chat" button (first one in the sidebar) in chatgpt.com

  • aorloff · 12 hours ago

    > Deepseek could blow both out of the water unexpectedly This is tantamount to saying that the value proposition is unknown, if a supposed trillion dollar company could get upended overnight by a startup Where's the moat, the unassailable first mover advantage, the enterprise lock intengrations that mean nobody could realistically move you out of the way even if they had slightly better tech ? If none of these exist, investors should be scared.

    • ftchd · 12 hours ago

      It's good that we're starting to ask these questions.

    • versteegen · 4 hours ago

      DeepSeek can't come out of nowhere to match them. They don't have anywhere near enough compute for that; Liang Wenfeng said as much in his leaked comments to investors. That's the moat.

  • georgemcbay · 10 hours ago

    > There's also the Elon factor. Anthropic has a good relationship with Elon (to the point where he discounted the compute sold to them by quite a lot) while OpenAI/Sama is the devil to him. The Elon association could be a long-term negative. It certainly didn't help the Republicans in this last election even with Elon donating half a billion dollars to them (post 2024 Elon appears to be, like AIPAC, more of a toxic association than any amount of money gained can overcome), and there are reasons to believe that flip on the political side will eventually matter on the business side of things. Elon's Texas "home base" just flipped blue in a big way and there are likely to be high profile investigations into whatever it was he was doing with DOGE. And perhaps most directly important to Anthropic, unless the winds change significantly in terms of the politics surrounding data centers (and I suspect if anything they will get increasingly hostile, not better), I wouldn't be surprised to see the Memphis city council get purged of pro-Colossus members, replaced by anti-data-center candidates when the next elections take place in Oct 2027.

• xvector · 14 hours ago

  This was just part 1 of their raise. They are raising another few billion this week.

• outside1234 · 14 hours ago

  The reality is that both of these companies do not have a scalable business model and even the dumb money has figured that out

  • xienze · 13 hours ago

    Weird, I've been told repeatedly that inference is wildly profitable for both of these companies and waves hands training costs are irrelevant for some reason.

    • flatline · 12 hours ago

      It’s: we spent X billion to train our HUGE model and it’s so good we can make money off it. Please fund us for Y billion to build the HUGER model that will maybe destroy the planet, and if it doesn’t we can’t sell it back to users at profit because of legitimate security concerns. And then we’ll need Z billion to train... Does anyone see the path to ROI here? There is clearly a profitable business model within these big AI labs, but it’s held captive by messianic 90-page IPO risk statements. I know they want to sell restricted access to the more capable models but the market for those kind of professional services doesn’t even exist yet.

      • SoftTalker · 12 hours ago

        Are there enough people using AI for coding and advanced math and physics who need even better models to justify these values? Because for "normie" non-coding tasks (searching, summarizing, writing) which it seems to me are what the vast majority of users would use, we have ChatGPT at work it defaults to the Luna 6 model and it seems fine as-is today.

      • randomNumber7 · 11 hours ago

        > Does anyone see the path to ROI here? Replacing all work where someone sits exclusivly behind a screen.

  • Esophagus4 · 12 hours ago

    Wut? They’re raising at $1T, which makes them one of the planet’s largest companies and they’ve only been around for a short time, comparatively. Yes, there was noise about possibly higher valuations still, but the [edit: private] market definitely thinks there is a $1T business model here.

• segmondy · 13 hours ago

  "They're almost certainly worth much less than Anthropic" you type that with so much conviction. I have no dog in this fight, but I'm not so such. We have seen OpenAI provide models in Audio, Image, Video, etc. Perhaps it's for publicity, but their models have tackled difficult math problems and those that I know that use their top models are just as happy with it as they are with Opus 5.5. IMO, I think they are neck and neck.

  • vmg12 · 13 hours ago

    Yes that is all interesting but the only thing that matters for company valuations is how much money they make, how quickly the amount of money they make is growing, and how much the assets they own are worth.

  • pizlonator · 13 hours ago

    Anthropic better at turning whatever it is they have into higher revenue than OpenAI At the end of the day that’s all that matters

    • SV_BubbleTime · 12 hours ago

      I would call this an “emotional fact”. Also, if you really believed this, you put every dollar you had into an anthropic IPO. I don’t think you will.

      • mlnj · 12 hours ago

        It's not a binary decision. I wouldn't put my money into either at these valuations.

        • pizlonator · 4 hours ago

          Yeah that might be the best choice. Not sure though. My best guesses about what'll happen to Anthropic have enormous error bars...

      • jmb99 · 12 hours ago

        You can believe than anthropic is a better investment (“worth more”) than OpenAI while still thinking they’re both overvalued (or will underperform other investments).

• steelframe · 13 hours ago

  No idea who's actually worth more than who here, but I will say that recently I've stopped using Opus at work for the lion's share of technical work. I used GPT-6.1 Sol for one big project I tackled last week, where the agents spent about 20 hours to produce ~73k LoC across 22 PRs. While the technical decisions and code weren't bad and design gaps were left clearly enumerated, the overall "human factor" was terrible, in the sense that the plan docs were overly-verbose and difficult to read and PR descriptions were abysmal. Numbers and words were run together all over the place where there should have been spaces. At that point I pointed Opus 5.5 at the whole thing and asked it to double-check design and code and rewrite all the "for human consumption" text in plan docs and PR description, and it did a phenomenal job of that part of it. Plan docs were made much more concise with emphasis on the strategic parts of the problem. Opus accepted the vast majority of the design and code that GPT-6.1 Sol had produced. Of course I have no idea what the technical results would have been if I had just used Opus 5.5 end-to-end, but I'm fairly confident it would have been more expensive given the rates my company pays for each. For that matter I wonder how Kimi3.1 Pro or DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 would have done with various parts of the job. In fact I may try rerunning the whole thing using open weight models next week just out of curiosity. If Kimi+DeepSeek produce something roughly equivalent, then just from my own personal experience with a novel problem involving legacy in-house code, as opposed to public benchmarks for which I don't have a great handle on how well they correlate with value produced by the models, that will make me question the valuation of both OpenAI and Anthropic.

  • drewnick · 11 hours ago

    I use Opus 5.5 for planning, sprinkle in a Fable 5.1 review of the spec (they go back and fourth), then send the spec and plan to my local deepseek 4.1 Flash 1017 to implement. It crunches away for a good while (using ds harness) Then check w/ Opus and Astra for good measure if it really matters. Works well. DSv4.1 is okay but does make mistakes. I run my 2x DGX sparks at 60-70% capacity this way, which nets about $400/mo worth of tokens on $30 of electricity. I am hoping in the next six months to be able to in-house ALL of the above using a slightly more competent model, or two more sparks. It is slow running local, but it is really fascinating to have all this work done from my desk.

• youngtaff · 12 hours ago

  They’re way short of their target… On 31st Oct, the FT was reporting they’d already cut the funding target from $30bn to $20bn and it looks like the couldn’t get close to that even https://www.ft.com/content/7a3ad950-1b3b-4d9e-8c15-65a61ae61...

• taikon · 12 hours ago

  Just curious, why would they be worth less than Anthropic?

  • timacles · 12 hours ago

    Anthropic sells the Models the businesses prefer. That’s where the money is right now

• jeffybefffy519 · 10 hours ago

  Have both OpenAI and Anthropic made a fundamental miscalculation here (and a lot of misteps) by targeting the top end of the valuation? Surely can only go down right?

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, Grok: they can't all be worth $1T (or $1T additional in Google's case) at the same time.

• Forgeties79 · 14 hours ago

  It still baffles me that Grok is even on the list let alone being funded. Their market share is terrible and the product is so mediocre. Why on earth would I want a tool that has “be funny and irreverent” baked into its system prompts? I don’t want a calculator cracking wise at me either.

  • WarmWash · 14 hours ago

    Have you been on twitter? It's become a huge community of people who have their life savings in Elon, and endlessly circle jerk the hype.

    • Forgeties79 · 14 hours ago

      Not in several years and I plan on keeping it that way lol

  • rfgplk · 14 hours ago

    Grok had the potential of being the #1 LLM if they actually went through with Elons original promise of an "uncensored model". Meaning no guardrails, it does what you tell it, no matter what. Sadly Grok is even more restricted than even OpenAI's models, and despite being marketed as "edgy and ruthless" it is THE MOST politically correct model on the market. ChatGPT or Claude will gladly go along with religious or nationality based roleplay, while Grok outright refuses. Oh and you can't even use it for any pentesting whatsoever because a) it's far worse than the competition b) it completely refuses to even LOOK at low level code. But this goes along with Elons same promises for X; "X will support free speech" etc even though it's trivial to get banned for the most pointless things.

    • antonvs · 14 hours ago

      No company will be able to get away with offering a completely unconstrained commercial model. The legal risk and pushback from governments is too high.

    • xvector · 13 hours ago

      > if they actually went through with Elons original promise of an "uncensored model". Meaning no guardrails, it does what you tell it, no matter what. When will HNers realize that this is a fever dream? This is an edgy teenager's interpretation of "good". The second someone uses a frontier model to attack other entities or hurt innocent people it will get (rightfully) shut down by the government. We already saw this with the Fable export controls (and no one had even used these models offensively). Open models will reach the same fate once the gov't realizes they are good enough. They will just ban weight hosting, require safeguards for any model routers that accept US payment, and embargo anyone that doesn't do these things. There is a reason we don't let everyone in the world own RPGs.

      • randomNumber7 · 11 hours ago

        There are multiple problems: 1. The censoring goes much further than refuting to participate in a felony. 2. The censoring is done by private companies outside the democratic process. 3. Censoring requires a single source of truth. Somone who has then the power to decide what is true. Also most people will blindlessly beliefe everything an LLM says.

    • Forgeties79 · 12 hours ago

      No guardrails? So, what? Someone can get grok servers to attack critical infrastructure out of boredom? Take down a hospital network during an emergency or something? There was never a world where musk and co were going to take that risk. And people thought swatting was bad! Just imagine that jfc

  • puszczyk · 14 hours ago

    - cursor is good and covers many different use cases (multimodel "agents window", ai assistant in the editor chat, tab completion, cloud agents, ai code & security reviews) - grok bot was first to market as "openclaw for enterprises" and feel they really pioneered this UX - grok models are so-so but 4.6 had a great bang for the buck; they may still return to the "pareto frontier" for coding given all the data that cursor has also the valuation is not only on grok/cursor? also spacex (starling, currently cheapest deliver to orbit; future "data center in space") actually for an ai company i think they are quite well diversified and have multiple things going on for them; are they worth $1T --> i don't know, but i see a way to them doing really good (will they? on average, probably not, but at least it imaginable)

  • CodesInChaos · 14 hours ago

    The SpaceX/xAI valuation is crazy. Their rockets and satellite tech (i.e. SpaceX proper) is cool, but not worth anywhere near $1T. And in the AI space their tech doesn't feel competitive with Antropic/OpenAI. Not really better than the open Chinese models. What's its USP? Data centers in space that governments can't shut down without triggering Kessler syndrome?

  • dofm · 13 hours ago

    Sure makes it more entertaining for the guys choosing targets in Iran though.

• rfgplk · 14 hours ago

  It's a classic example of short term mispricing.

• bluecalm · 14 hours ago

  Google's valuation is not based on their AI. Google has a highly profitable ad and cloud business. I don't know why you are putting NVidia in that list. NVidia sells chips and even if AI models become a commodity they need to run on something. Grok - no ones is valuing it at anything close to 1T. Closer to 100M if anything if you add Cursor. SpaceX valuation is based on their highly profitable Starlink business, highly profitable datacenter build-up and options to charge more for their monopoly in launch. Grok/XAI/Twitter are a small drop in all of it. Demand for AI is real and increasing. There is real shortage of compute right now. It might be that AI lab is not a sustainable business but I don't see how all that demand evaporates. If anything it will only increase as AI becomes good at more and more tasks.

• chrisweekly · 14 hours ago

  I don't understand how Grok is in that list.

  • JacobAsmuth · 13 hours ago

    SpaceXSI is a $1T company

We always see these headlines and think "is XYZ company actually worth that much?" Class A stock gets paid out first, so "valuation" here is not what a retail investor would necessarily pay for class C. Basically, do these people think that they'll get their $11B back? If so, they are ok with a high "valuation" because there is little risk. And with OpenAI's corporate structure, who knows what is actually happening.

Valuation dropped, that's the real news. Altman couldn't raise the amount he wanted to so it's gonna just be a dumping ground in the public markets.

OpenAI seems to me like they are operating with a slightly longer horizon strategy than Anthropic. Going for the IPO is the last resort in my mind. It is what you do to get ahead of deteriorating financial conditions. I don't think Anthropic had a choice at their projected burn rate. Why would we surrender all our cloaks and daggers unless we absolutely have to? The political and regulatory headwinds are not looking favorable for AI companies as of a few days ago. Going for the IPO collapses a large space of options that are available to the business. The AI business is entirely about data. Anthropic's IPO would generate an incredible amount of data that could be used by its competitors to refine their strategy. Knowing where to allocate capital is perhaps worth more than the capital itself at these scales.

• ifwinterco · 14 hours ago

  Issue is the deteriorating market conditions are already happening, Anthropic didn’t really get ahead of them, but they might just about be able to get the IPO over the line this year albeit for less than they hoped. What OpenAI will do if market sentiment around AI really falls apart I’m not sure

  • outside1234 · 14 hours ago

    Acquisition by Microsoft for 80B in a fire sale

• an0malous · 14 hours ago

  They filed a confidential S-1 in May, this fundraise was likely plan B

  • paxy · 12 hours ago

    They probably could have pushed the IPO through like Anthropic. Sensing the headwinds and delaying it was the smarter move though. With how quickly things are changing in the space who knows how the economy and the public perception on AI and data centers will be in mid-2027.

• ozgrakkurt · 12 hours ago

  I like how nothing you are writing is based on anything. Just vibes all around, optimus robots, flying cars, bioweapons, space data centers.

  • itsfine2 · 9 hours ago

    This is what commenting on anything in 2026 is all about.

Called it months ago when they released Luna etc. and started subsidizing prices even more. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49117798 > I bet they’ll announce new fundraising soon. Someone gave them a top up to try and corner the market. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012065 > > As OpenAI bides its time, the company is engaging in early stage discussions with investors about a potential new funding round. The company could raise around $30 billion, CNBC previously reported, but that figure could change. > I predicted last month when they launched Luna that they had raised more funding and I suspect this tidbit dropped to CNBC is just prepping the public for a fundraising that’s already happened. There will probably be an announcement this month.

When this bubble pops the retail investors who are holding the bag are going to suffer so much unfortunately Wikipedia article on who suffers the most when speculative bubbles pop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

• bagacrap · 11 hours ago

  Luckily no retail investors own oai yet? It's not like mag7 are going away if the bubble does pop. They might even benefit.

Is that even enough to keep the lights on?

That's a lot of money.

> SoftBank and Abu Dhabi’s MGX took part in the round Why is it always SoftBank?

• jasomill · 13 hours ago

  SoftBank was already one of OpenAI's largest investors before this round.

• dofm · 13 hours ago

  It's because the CEO has AI psychosis.

  • bagacrap · 11 hours ago

    It was always SoftBank even before AI mania

    • dofm · 9 hours ago

      He has been vibes-based since well before it was fashionable!

Billion dollar valuation startups used to be called unicorns because they were mythical creatures that didn’t exist. Now we have a trillion dollar startup, still raising money, implying that the status quo isn’t remotely their final form. I understand AI is actually, no-bullshit, changing the world forever, including the global economy. That said, how much of this order of magnitude jump since “unicorn” got coined can be directly attributed to USD inflation?

• paxy · 13 hours ago

  > Billion dollar valuation startups used to be called unicorns because they were mythical creatures that didn’t exist. If they didn't exist then you wouldn't need to coin a term to describe them. In reality in the mid 2010s when "unicorn" started being used there were already hundreds of them.

• delecti · 13 hours ago

  > how much of this order of magnitude jump since “unicorn” got coined can be directly attributed to USD inflation? "Inflation" is probably not quite the right term, or maybe it implies too broad or too narrow of a phenomenon. I think we're experiencing the result of decades of taxes being too low on the rich, so there's too much money chasing too little actual real productivity growth. The Buffett indicator keeps ticking higher and higher, because the rich have too much money. It's gotta go somewhere, so everything is turning into tulips. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffett_indicator

  • olelele · 10 hours ago

    Yes exactly. There are no world changing inventions left on par w the Industrial Revolution, nitrate fertilizer or modern high productivity grains. The west outsourced production to china and Southeast Asia and will inevitably decline. However much sales talk comes out of sama and Dario et al.

It kinda seems like a lot of the maximalist plans required the rest of the world standing still. As opposed to other governments, companies, other people generally adapting and trying to get a piece for themselves.

• bagacrap · 11 hours ago

  The easy way to try to get a piece for yourself if you have, say, $11B, is to hand it over, I guess.

There was an unconfirmed report that upto $10 billion in this round were pledged by a syndicate of UAE investment funds, including MGX https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-05/openai-in...

• asdr-qwk · 13 hours ago

  Amazing, UAE is paying protection money. The Iran war pays off for Josh Kushner, who is invested in OpenAI (and already had been "lucky" with the outrageous price that Musk paid for Cursor). More investigations need to happen.

  • kolbe · 12 hours ago

    "Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don't know how anything works"

• kilroy123 · 13 hours ago

  I would agree and then argue they're not getting what they're paying for.

• bagacrap · 12 hours ago

  UAE seems to like to diversify into money losing yet culturally relevant investments like man city. I guess if there's even a 1% chance that sama is right and money will have no value in the future (or that no company besides AI companies will have value), it's worth getting a stake in OpenAi etc at any price, especially if you have more cash than you can possibly use otherwise.

The 'T' in that number is breathtaking. Amusing flashback: remember about a year ago various tech publications claimed OpenAI was destined for bankruptcy since they were bleeding cash. Even funnier, people believed that.

• fakedang · 13 hours ago

  To be honest, both can be true. They're raising puny amounts of cash relative to either their market cap or their commitments. And like another comment assinuated, this could be a ploy by the UAE to protect their AI investment after the recent decline - $10 billion is being funded by MGX, an AI holding company of the UAE.

I'm still astonished on how musk outplayed everyone with the spacex ipo.

• ttul · 13 hours ago

  His skill is moving rapidly. He is ruthless with his senior team. It’s not a comfortable place to work. Nobody sleeps over there.

• contingencies · 13 hours ago

  Nothing like timely de-regulation to spur automatic public bag-holding.

• flatline · 12 hours ago

  This is his real superpower.

• rokhayakebe · 11 hours ago

  Can you please elaborate?

  • raymond_goo · 1 hour ago

    He moved AI into SpaceX and did the IPO when AI was still hot. Great timing. (Elon Musk merged his artificial intelligence startup xAI into SpaceX in February 2026 and the stock initially traded far above what its earnings, cash flow, and execution risks could support)

I don't like open AI but it seems their model is good now to eat up CAD, a craft I had learned, it's really impressive by now, more impressive than claude with code if you ask me.

• freecodeio · 13 hours ago

  while some mild bug or hallucination can go unnoticed, CNC machines and 3d printers are absolutely gonna choke on mistakes, which seems to be plenty according to youtube vids

  • throwup238 · 13 hours ago

    Hopefully you have deterministic CAM or a slicer that does the hard work of generating gcode that won’t destroy something…

  • KeplerBoy · 13 hours ago

    3D printers are pretty robust. If it slices, it won't cause a catastrophic CNC crash. If you slice it with supports and print it on a good machine, it will most likely turn out usable. CNC mills are a different beast. If you ask your LLM of choice for some random gcode and run that, you deserve whatever happens.

  • proxyscore · 13 hours ago

    Yeah, however I am talking the cad part, chatgtp can now do image to step file without errors takes 5 minutes for a single relatively complicated component. Many softwares trip up on many things there, so did chatgtp up until maybe a year ago, now it can actually do image to step file where classic sw fails, I thought I'll never see the day but here we are

  • arjie · 13 hours ago

    You’re running it through a deterministic layer right? I model in build123d or blender and slice in bambu studio or orcaslicer.

  • adrianvi · 12 hours ago

    I have bought recently a 3d printer and I am mainly using AI to generate the products. With opus 5.5, it's quite good. Normally I just prompt that it will be 3d printed and it avoids floating objects, from time to time I see on the slicer that there are and it checks all geometry and fixes it. Most of the issues come from bad measurements or interactions with real world objects (margin for impurities, improving ergonomy, etc.). For easy changes I could be faster if I knew how to fix the STL file directly. For more complex designs, I think opus is faster. I would say that knowing what you actually need to create and the limitations and characteristics of 3d printing is more important than knowing how to handle the 3d design tool.

• ozgrakkurt · 12 hours ago

  They probably spend more money in a year than all money that has been spent on cad in the history of cad. Why does it matter if they “eat up” cad?

How many months of runway is that? Three?

> Asked about the election, she said, “The demand for AI is real.” "Give me some quick soundbites for my meeting with the press."

For all the naysayers, remember that OpenAI is just one model release away from a spectacular valuation increase.

• argee · 12 hours ago

  The opposite is also true.

These really should just be national projects. We will get there like China has.

• r_lee · 12 hours ago

  but they're not national projects in China either?

  • kolbe · 12 hours ago

    China has very blurry lines between private and public.

    • dmix · 12 hours ago

      Usually by allowing more local state governments to invest in these companies, rather than the central party controlling them. The main party does get involved on a more personal level if the company leaders threaten the CCP's power though. That said, China's own party-favoured economists have been warning about domestic AI investment being overheated since these Chinese AI companies haven't been shown to make much money yet to justify it.

Haha, all these discussions are all the same. I enjoyed the diversity of opinions in 2012 for Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4021957 Similarly in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613442 I wonder if that chap who said he’d put everything in FB at $14 put any at $18 because boy is he going to be wealthy today haha! The numbers all go up beyond what can you believe and were we in a bubble? Apparently we continue to be.

• bagacrap · 11 hours ago

  If I ever become fantastically wealthy I hope it's by some means more ethical than investing in Facebook. In any case, buying QQQ, while not exactly broadly diversified, still more diversified/less risky than just FB, would have yielded nearly the same return since FB's IPO.