OpenAI Is Falling Out of Favor With Secondary Buyers

(Bloomberg) — OpenAI shares have fallen out of favor on the secondary market — in some cases becoming almost impossible to unload — as investors pivot quickly to Anthropic, its biggest competitor.

Even as OpenAI raced in recent months to raise tens of billions of dollars, Next Round Capital founder Ken Smythe said his secondary marketplace was seeing a drop in demand for shares of the artificial-intelligence giant. About a half-dozen institutional investors — including hedge funds and venture capital firms that hold large stakes — approached his company in recent weeks looking to sell about $600 million of OpenAI shares.

Last year, they would have been snatched up within days. But now, no one’s biting.

“We literally couldn’t find anyone in our pool of hundreds of institutional investors to take these shares,” said Smythe, whose firm has handled $2.5 billion of transactions. Meanwhile, “buyers have indicated they have $2 billion of cash ready to deploy into Anthropic.”

Other marketplaces are also seeing record demand for Anthropic, including Augment and Hiive. The large gap between OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation and Anthropic’s $380 billion has investors rushing to grab equity in the latter before it rises, according to Augment co-founder Adam Crawley.

“It’s just better risk-reward right now,” he said. “People are betting that Anthropic’s valuation will catch up with OpenAI’s. But if you buy OpenAI shares, it’s less clear what the return will be in the near term.”

Anthropic and OpenAI don’t allow investors to trade shares on the secondary market without their permission. Still, access to the shares is available on many platforms as investors sell their interests through other mechanisms such as special-purpose vehicles.

“People should be extremely cautious of any firm that purports to have access to OpenAI equity, including through an SPV,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We recently established authorized channels for individual participation, including through banks. We did this with zero fees to counter the high fee broker model.”

Banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have begun offering OpenAI shares to wealth clients without charging carry fees, according to a person familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, Goldman is charging its usual carry for clients interested in Anthropic. That fee is often roughly 15% to 20% of profits.

Representatives for the banks declined to comment. Anthropic didn’t comment.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced it had put the finishing touches on its largest-ever fundraising, drawing $122 billion in backing from tech giants, venture capital funds and retail investors alike.

Primary fundraising and secondary sales don’t always follow the same playbook. In fundraising rounds, existing investors are often offered the chance to buy more shares to maintain their stakes, and instead of saying no — which founders may not like — they can buy in and then sell some of that exposure on the secondary market.

Both AI firms have grown rapidly in recent years, particularly after OpenAI’s 2022 debut of ChatGPT and Anthropic’s subsequent launch of Claude. Both companies are weighing plans to go public, with OpenAI’s listing expected as early as this year.

Some investors have grown cautious over OpenAI’s soaring operating costs. The company has committed to spend far more than Anthropic on infrastructure to support its AI ambitions in coming years. And while OpenAI touts a strong consumer base, it’s moving slowly on capturing more lucrative enterprise clients. Anthropic, meanwhile, has dominated that higher-margin market and, as a result, its growth trajectory appears to be stronger than OpenAI’s, Crawley said.

Meanwhile, Anthropic has other challenges. It’s suing the US Department of Defense after the Pentagon designated the company a supply-chain risk and ordered a ban on government entities using its technology. And just this week, Anthropic had its second security slip-up in a matter of days, when it inadvertently released internal source code behind Claude.

Next Round sees bids for OpenAI coming in at a valuation of about $765 billion, a 10% discount from the previous $850 billion.

“The market is much more in demand for Anthropic,” Augment’s Crawley said.

His firm and Next Round are both seeing huge bids for Anthropic that value it at roughly $600 billion, more than 50% higher than its previous funding round. Meanwhile, Hiive has registered more than $1.6 billion of demand for Anthropic shares, also at a premium, said co-founder Prab Rattan.

“The demand is one of the highest we’ve ever seen,” Crawley said. “It’s essentially unlimited interest.”

—With assistance from Seth Fiegerman, Edison Wu and Shirin Ghaffary.

(Updates to include OpenAI comment in eighth paragraph.)

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