Investors dump OpenAI shares to chase Anthropic

A year ago, getting your hands on OpenAI private shares felt like winning the lottery. Any institutional block put up for sale was scooped up in days. But today, the secondary market is telling a wildly different story.

According to a report from Bloomberg News, demand for OpenAI shares has sharply cooled off over recent months, with deep-pocketed investors turning their attention and their capital toward Anthropic.

$600M in OpenAI stock sits with no takers

Ken Smythe, founder of private markets platform Next Round Capital, said his firm has witnessed a notable drop in demand for OpenAI equity. In recent weeks, about six institutional investors, including hedge funds and venture capital firms holding major positions, approached Smythe trying to offload roughly $600 million worth of OpenAI shares.

Just last year, an offering of that scale would have been snapped up almost immediately. Right now, Smythe says, there are simply no buyers.

That freeze comes even as OpenAI recently closed a massive $122 billion funding round that pegged its valuation at $852 billion.

Meanwhile, rival marketplaces like Augment and Hiive are clocking record-shattering demand for Anthropic shares. Adam Crawley, co-founder of Augment, pointed out that investors are fixated on the valuation spread. OpenAI sits at an eye-watering $852 billion, while Anthropic is valued at around $380 billion. Investors see an arbitrage window to grab Anthropic equity before the gap closes and prices jump.

Wall Street waives its fees just to move inventory

The most telling shift might be happening inside Wall Street's wealth management desks. Sources familiar with the matter say Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have started pitching OpenAI shares to rich clients without charging any carry fees whatsoever.

Anthropic, however, gets no such promotional discount. Goldman Sachs is charging its standard carry fee for clients wanting into Anthropic, which typically ranges from 15% to 20% of net profits.

When premier investment banks start waiving performance cuts just to clear inventory, you know where the institutional crowd really stands.

Why it matters

For anyone tracking the AI arms race, secondary share dynamics are often the cleanest barometer of smart-money sentiment. Public hype can stay loud for months, but the private market deals in cold math and exit multiples.

At an $852 billion valuation, OpenAI looks priced for sheer perfection. If you buy in today, you need the company to become one of the most valuable corporations in human history just to earn a decent venture return. Anthropic, sitting at less than half that valuation at $380 billion with massive traction among developers, looks like a far cleaner risk-reward trade.

We think Wall Street dropping carry fees on OpenAI is a glaring red flag for early momentum chasing. It suggests existing backers want to take chips off the table, yet fresh secondary capital is refusing to pay the premium. If OpenAI cannot quickly translate its massive compute footprint into runaway revenue, the valuation gravity that usually hits public tech giants will start catching up to it on private desks first.