OpenAI Races to Lock $30B Before Anthropic's IPO Prices It

The smartest thing OpenAI has done this week is say nothing at all. While Anthropic was busy hosting an investor day, Sam Altman's company was quietly racing to lock down roughly $30 billion in investor commitments — at a valuation north of $1.4 trillion — before Anthropic's expected mid-November IPO hands the market a public price for a frontier AI lab. For the first time in its history, OpenAI isn't just raising money. It's raising against a clock, and the clock belongs to its rival.

That's the picture painted by a Reuters exclusive published on October 19, citing two people familiar with the matter. OpenAI has been meeting long-only funds and sovereign wealth funds — the deepest-pocketed, most patient money on the planet — and pushing for a timetable that even seasoned dealmakers describe as unusually fast for a financing of this size. SoftBank Group and Abu Dhabi's MGX, both existing OpenAI backers, are among those in talks to join the round, according to one of the people.

Why the hurry? Because Anthropic and OpenAI are now drinking from the same well. The same sovereign wealth funds, the same long-only institutions, the same family offices are being asked to allocate capital to two enormous, competing offerings within days or weeks of each other. Some investors view OpenAI's push as a straightforward land grab: lock up commitments now, before that money gets earmarked for Anthropic's public debut instead.

File photo: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in San Francisco, October 2024. (Photo: James Tamim via Flickr, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Update, Oct. 20: the two investor days collided

The scheduling tells the story better than any quote. OpenAI held meetings with long-only funds and sovereign wealth funds last week — the same week Anthropic was hosting its own investor day, per the Reuters sources. Two labs, two institutional roadshows, one finite pool of allocators. That is the urgency: with both fundraises landing weeks apart, OpenAI is racing to lock multi-billion-dollar commitments that could otherwise flow into Anthropic's IPO order book — capital scarcity, not just competition, is the engine (RetailNews Asia, Oct. 20). The market backdrop is doing the rest of the talking: rising rates, tech-stock volatility, and the Wall Street skeptics now calling OpenAI a bubble are all making the $1.4 trillion number harder to defend — which is exactly why Altman wants it agreed before a public Anthropic print makes "the comp" unavoidable. Altman's pledge of no IPO until the models are safe means the $30B doubles as insurance against the 2027 listing slipping, while the infra bill behind it keeps growing — even as Nvidia's $100B commitment falling apart shows how fragile the funding side can get. Anthropic, for its part, is dressing for the listing too: Anthropic's $48B public-benefit pledge is timed to arrive before the same investors it will ask to buy shares.

The number at the centre of everything: $1.4 trillion

Let's get the arithmetic out of the way, because it is genuinely staggering. OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion in March, after a record-breaking $122 billion funding round that included Amazon's commitment to invest up to $50 billion. A valuation above $1.4 trillion would be more than 64 percent higher — in roughly seven months. Companies that grow their price tags by two-thirds in half a year are supposed to be early-stage rockets, not the most valuable private company on Earth.

This is not the first time the $30 billion figure has surfaced. TechPulse USA reported the earlier talks in September, when the round was still in its early, investor-led stage and described as potential bridge financing to a 2027 IPO. What is new — and what makes this a different story — is the acceleration. Back then, the valuation floated was roughly $1.4 trillion. Now it is over $1.4 trillion. Back then, there was no deadline. Now there is one, and its name is Anthropic's IPO.

Edward Best, co-chair of capital markets at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, put the logic in one clean sentence to Reuters. Best is not working on the deal and was speaking hypothetically, which makes the bluntness more notable, not less: "OpenAI could want to set its own valuation and not have to worry about a comp (comparison)," he said. "It's really a two-horse race in terms of being public."

He is right, and the metaphor matters. In a two-horse race, the first horse across the finish line sets the pace everyone else is judged against. OpenAI wants to be that horse — before Anthropic's financial disclosures give investors a fuller picture of the business and invite the kind of side-by-side comparison that private valuations are designed to avoid.

$50 billion now, $70 billion by Christmas — OpenAI's pitch

To justify a 64 percent markup in seven months, OpenAI is telling investors a story of acceleration. According to one of Reuters' sources, the company is pitching annualised revenue of $50 billion — already reached — and expects that figure to hit $70 billion by year-end. The growth, it says, steepened after the launch of its GPT-6 Astra model. It has also cut prices on its cheaper models, which it claims boosted usage, and it told investors it can push AI model prices even lower.

Every one of those numbers deserves a small asterisk, because they are OpenAI's own claims, relayed by a source, not audited figures. That matters for a reason close to home: TechPulse USA's own reporting last month documented OpenAI scrapping Astra over safety concerns. Whether the pitch refers to a revived model, a loose use of the name, or something investors will need to pin down — CFO Sarah Friar is the person one source says will be pressed for more detail — the gap between OpenAI's public narrative and its investor narrative is exactly the kind of thing Anthropic's disclosures will help the market measure.

OpenAI's enterprise revenue surge has been TechPulse's own running story — enterprise sales doubling, consumer revenue in one quarter outpacing all of last year. But pitch decks are not financial statements, and a $1.4 trillion price tag is a claim on future profits, not past revenue. At $50 billion in annualised revenue, that valuation is roughly 28 times sales — before a single dollar of profit.

Anthropic's numbers: strong, but decelerating — and that word matters

Anthropic, for its part, has numbers that would make almost any company on Earth weep with joy — and investors who are starting to look nervous anyway. Its annualised revenue reached roughly $65 billion by July, Reuters previously reported. Quarterly revenue jumped to $16.8 billion in the third quarter from $11.6 billion in the second. But month-to-month growth is slowing, and that deceleration has seeded an argument among existing and prospective investors: some are now pushing for an IPO valuation closer to $1.5 trillion rather than the $2 trillion the company once hoped for. A $500 billion haircut, negotiated in whispers, before a single share has priced.

File photo: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. (Photo: TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The two companies, meanwhile, are fighting a shadow war over the numbers themselves. OpenAI records revenue on a net basis — subtracting partner shares upfront — and has accused Anthropic of inflating its results by counting the full, gross value of contracts sold through third-party cloud providers. Anthropic says it follows established accounting practices. This is not a footnote. If the two labs are worth a combined $3.5 trillion at their hoped-for valuations, investors are entitled to know whether they are comparing apples with apples or apples with a very flattering artist's impression of apples.

Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, gave the enterprise side of this story its sharpest telling on CNBC on October 19. "Anthropic was in the strongest position early this year," he said — "they dominated almost the entire enterprise market at that time, and growth rates were really soaring." Since then, he continued, "OpenAI has caught up, and companies have started using open-weight models as they realized they were spending too much money on AI." That, Luria said, is why Anthropic's growth has slowed.

The market is not cooperating — and everyone can see it

There is a second reason for the speed, and it has nothing to do with Anthropic: the market OpenAI is selling into is wobbling. Reuters describes a choppy autumn — oil price volatility, rising bond yields, growing concern about AI safety — and a sudden, brutal scrutiny of the debt underwriting the entire boom. We covered the industry's debt binge in detail, and the latest chapter is CoreWeave, whose shares and debt tumbled last week as investors picked through the nearly $50 billion in borrowings funding its expansion. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index — the market's proxy for AI chip demand — has shed $1.6 trillion in value in less than two weeks.

The IPO pipeline is visibly backing up. Blackstone-backed AirTrunk REIT, Nvidia-backed Firmus, and SoftBank-backed SB Energy have all pulled or paused their listings. Nuclear services company Holtec pulled its US listing last month, citing what it called a "perfect storm" driven mainly by uncertainty around data-centre demand. Bankers told Reuters that a number of companies preparing to go public are deliberately waiting until after Anthropic's IPO, wary of competing for investor demand — and some are timing private rounds to avoid coinciding with the debut entirely.

What the $30 billion is actually for

Beyond beating Anthropic to the punch, investors familiar with OpenAI say the capital has two hard purposes: funding its substantial infrastructure commitments, and bolstering the balance sheet in case deteriorating IPO markets delay the planned 2027 listing. That second motive is the quiet tell. A company sprinting to raise $30 billion in part as insurance against its own IPO not happening on schedule is a company that knows the window could shut.

Now the stance. Let's call this what it is: a colossal game of pricing chicken, played with other people's money, in front of a market that has just spent two weeks marking AI assets down by trillions. OpenAI's logic is brutally rational — set your own price before the market sets it for you, because the first public comp in a category becomes the comp for everyone. But there is a shoddier reading available too: a company whose investor pitch leans on a model it publicly scrapped, whose revenue figures are self-reported and unaudited, asking sovereign wealth funds to move at unprecedented speed precisely so nobody has time to ask hard questions. Both readings can be true at once. Whether a $1.4 trillion private valuation can survive contact with a public market will decide not just OpenAI's price, but the price of the entire AI trade.

What happens next

The near-term script is clear. OpenAI wants signed commitments before Anthropic's disclosures land — disclosures that, one source told Reuters, could see investors pressing CFO Sarah Friar for far more detail on revenue growth and the company's financial outlook. Anthropic's mid-November debut then becomes the event the whole sector has been holding its breath for: the first real, tradeable answer to the question of what a frontier AI lab is worth.

We reached out to OpenAI and MGX for comment ahead of publication and had received no response by press time. OpenAI and SoftBank declined to comment to Reuters; Anthropic and MGX did not immediately respond to its requests either. When the two most valuable private companies in AI history both go quiet at once, it usually means the talking is happening in term sheets.

OpenAI $30B raise FAQ: what we know, what we don't

Why is OpenAI raising $30B now?
To secure commitments before Anthropic's expected mid-November IPO gives investors a public benchmark to price OpenAI against — and to lock capital from an allocator pool both labs are drawing from.

Who is participating in the round?
SoftBank, Abu Dhabi's MGX and other existing backers are in talks, and OpenAI has approached long-only funds and sovereign wealth investors — but commitments are not finalised (Reuters, Oct. 19).

What valuation is OpenAI targeting?
Over $1.4 trillion — more than 64% above the $852 billion March 2026 round, which raised $122 billion.

When is OpenAI's IPO?
Not until 2027 at the earliest, per company guidance — the $30B functions as bridge financing and balance-sheet insurance if IPO markets deteriorate further.

Sources: Reuters (exclusive, Oct. 19, 2026); ChosunBiz; The Hindu BusinessLine/PTI; Calcalistech; Invezz; Yonhap Infomax (CNBC segment relay); Financial Times (prior reporting, via Reuters).

By Maya Ellison
Maya Ellison covers AI finance and startup markets for TechPulse USA from New York, where she writes about the money behind the models.