Anthropic is currently enjoying a boom period in the private market space. The implied valuation of shares in the AI company has reached $1.2 trillion on secondary markets, according to a recent report—yet there is an important caveat that is disappointing the most active of buyers: virtually no shareholders are willing to sell their shares.
At Caplight, a platform for secondary transactions run by cofounder and CEO Javier Avalos, trading is occurring at the $1.2 trillion level, with Avalos referring to Anthropic as the most coveted company in the venture secondary market. At the $1.2 trillion level as well, the CEO of Rainmaker Securities, Glen Anderson, confirms the deals—but not their closings because of the virtual unwillingness of the sellers.
It's gotten to the point of being quite amusing. Anderson said in an interview that there is so much demand for shares of Anthropic that there are almost no sellers, rendering the buying process very difficult, if not impossible.
In a humorous note to the reporter, Anderson stated that if he could fill everyone's order on Anthropic stock, he would not be doing the interview right now; rather, he would be lounging on a beach.
This amount of growth cannot be understated. The $1.2 trillion value is a 550% year-over-year rise in the number, based on data from Javier Avalos. As a point of context: Anthropic's valuation back in February stood at $380 billion, but after its next financing round by the end of May, it was valued at $965 billion. The $965 billion is actually the result of the H series of fundraising that occurred in late May.
This trajectory gets even more interesting when looking even farther back in time. In early 2023, secondary marketplaces had placed the value of Anthropic at close to $1 trillion, which was, itself, three times greater than the company's Series G funding of $380 billion in February. Some investors even had bids of up to $1.15 trillion.
Secondary markets have also served as a proxy war between the two most prominent names in artificial intelligence, and currently, Anthropic is the clear victor. OpenAI, which had held a greater valuation than Anthropic for years prior, is now trading at a value of $908 billion on Caplight, leaving Anthropic valued at $300 billion greater than its competitor.
The desire of investors is similarly indicative. According to Avalos, the ratio of interest was around five potential buyers of Anthropic against every two buying OpenAI. Nevertheless, OpenAI has not been inactive.
As Anderson reports, OpenAI had been receiving relatively low numbers of inquiries about purchasing the company until recently, but with the launch of the GPT-5.6 series of models, including Sol and Terra, the interest of investors was revived.
The reversal of fortune has taken several months.
In spring, the revenues of Anthropic were already growing so fast that the secondary market pricing was already outstripping its official valuation; according to one report, the company's annual revenues rose from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion in March 2026, which is 233% in one quarter thanks to the popularity of its software.
Growth rates like that provide investors with a story of their own, and the price was racing well beyond any funding rounds.
Because there is an unresolved question of the public listing of both companies, one cannot purchase stakes directly from either of them but can only obtain them on secondary markets by buying stakes owned by staff members or initial investors.
The consequence of such a development is that as the implied valuation continues to rise, there is increasingly no need for people who already hold stakes in the companies to sell them because selling them now would bring in less money than they would later get if they decided to wait and sold the shares after an IPO.
SPVs, which involve collecting money from several potential purchasers into a single deal, have become the standard means of carrying out purchases of stakes, despite the fact that Anthropic itself is against such deals. Indeed, Anthropic openly warns on its website that if someone claims that he or she will allow participation, direct or indirect, in the investment in Anthropic, the potential purchaser should treat such an offer as invalid. Still, some purchasers have gone far enough in offering to exchange their homes for Anthropic stock.
With Anthropic’s growing popularity in the private markets space, the company seems on track to go through with its plan for an initial public offering (IPO). The firm filed an IPO prospectus in early June with the Securities and Exchange Commission, an action that could result in one of the largest public offerings in the history of the market, although the timing of the offering will be determined by the market situation.
It is important to highlight the fact that the price of the secondary market trading is not equal to the value of the company itself, as determined by the board of directors. This type of trading is not liquid, involves a stake that does not grant any voting or board rights, and reflects the price offered by just one investor, rather than a whole institutional financing round. However, the trend is quite clear: investors believe firmly that revenues of Anthropic, which are based, among other things, on the coding-oriented products, will prove the high value set on the company by the market right.
On a separate note, Anthropic has claimed a monthly revenue run rate of $47 billion as of May, against an actual annual revenue of $10 billion for all of 2025, and forecasts quarterly earnings of $10.9 billion—figures that go some way towards explaining why there continue to be buyers in spite of the fact that there is virtually nothing being bought.
