United States of America

Reuters: OpenAI Accelerating Fundraising Ahead of Anthropic IPO

Is OpenAI's burn rate the normal price of a genuine platform shift or a bubble about to drag down every AI valuation?

4 hours ago·Updated 1 hour ago

Reuters: OpenAI Accelerating Fundraising Ahead of Anthropic IPO

Story

Above: A billboard advertising OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra in New York City, U.S., on Sept. 18. Image credit: James Leynse/Getty Images

The Facts

OpenAI is accelerating efforts to secure investor funding ahead of Anthropic's IPO expected in November, which could value the firm at more than $1.4 trillion, according to an exclusive Reuters report on Monday.
Reuters
Two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that OpenAI aimed to capture an investor base it shares with Anthropic by leveraging recent revenue growth following the launch of new AI systems, notably GPT-6 Astra, which charges $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.
Reuters
Openai
Previous reporting claimed that OpenAI's annualized revenue totaled $50 billion in September, with the company targeting $70 billion by December through its expanding enterprise business, which CFO Sarah Friar told investors in August produces more revenue than its consumer-based counterpart.
Bloomberg
Financial Times
CNBC
Using this as a pitch, sources said OpenAI is currently in discussions with Japan's SoftBank Group, the UAE's MGX and other existing backers of the AI outfit to finance a roughly $30 billion funding round.
Reuters
Openai
OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion in March, after closing a $122 billion funding round to accelerate AI development, backed by NVIDIA, Microsoft and Amazon, which alone agreed to invest $50 billion in the AI lab.
Openai
Openai
Anthropic, meanwhile, is preparing to go public sometime in mid-November as part of a bid to raise $100 billion in capital, valuing the company at $2 trillion, after filing S-1 drafts with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in July.
The Wall Street Journal
International Financing Review
Anthropic

Sources Split

LEFT

CENTER

RIGHT

ESTAB
CRIT

CENTER

PRO
ESTAB

The Spin

Pro-industry narrative

Backing frontier AI means accepting that outsized bets carry outsized risk, and seasoned investors understand that trade-off. Judging a company rebuilding the computing stack by one year of cash burn misses how venture math actually works. The payoff from funding a genuine platform shift dwarfs the losses racked up getting there.

Andreessen Horowitz

Industry-critical narrative

OpenAI's math doesn't add up. It spends hundreds of billions but generates only a fraction of that in revenue, while a profitable rival and cheap Chinese systems squeeze the margin. Dumping product after product right before a float reveals a scramble for relevance. A stumble at this scale would drag down every valuation propped up by AI growth forecasts.

The Guardian