Anthropic and OpenAI Near $1 Trillion as AI Capital Concentrates

Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H in late May, landing at a $965 billion valuation. OpenAI had already set its own mark at $852 billion two months earlier. Between them, the two largest foundation model labs have absorbed 14% of all global venture capital in 2025, a figure with few precedents in the modern technology era.

Forbes invokes Nortel Networks as a cautionary frame: in the late 1990s, Nortel carried 75% of North America's internet backbone traffic and peaked at a $366 billion market cap before filing for bankruptcy in 2009. The comparison is not a prediction. It raises the harder question of whether the entity that builds the dominant infrastructure layer and the entity that profits most from what runs on it are necessarily the same.

The revenue case

Revenue gives the bull case something real to work with. Anthropic crossed $30 billion in annualized run rate by early April 2026, up from roughly $9 billion at the close of 2025, and Salesforce needed two full decades to reach that same figure. Foundation model funding also doubled in Q1 2026 relative to all of 2025, with capital concentrating in a diminishing number of labs rather than spreading across the broader ecosystem.

Growth at the infrastructure layer, however, does not automatically translate into capturing the value that infrastructure enables. That distinction matters more now than at any prior point in the artificial intelligence cycle. The current valuations appear to price in both strong revenue and permanent layer control simultaneously, and those are different claims.

Model cadence as signal

Both labs have maintained aggressive release schedules throughout the valuation run-up. LLM Stats shows Anthropic shipping Claude Opus 4.8 on May 28, and OpenAI releasing GPT-5.5 Instant on May 5. The AI Release Tracker, which has logged 160 frontier models since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, shows no slowdown in cadence from either company. Claude Opus 4.8's availability in Microsoft Foundry, flagged by Price Per Token, signals Anthropic's continued push into enterprise distribution.

Competitive pressure is building from below. DeepSeek shipped two open-weight V4 variants in late April. Mistral Medium 3.5 arrived as open source in the same window. The open-weight tier is now setting the benchmark floor that proprietary models must clear to justify premium pricing, and that floor keeps rising.

What the Nortel parallel actually means

The 1990s comparison is imprecise in key respects. Nortel built physical infrastructure with catastrophic capital expenditure requirements and very little operational flexibility. Foundation model labs are software-first, with cost structures that can in principle scale more efficiently. The parallel worth taking seriously is narrower: a single artificial intelligence category absorbing disproportionate private capital on the assumption that the top two players will control the layer indefinitely.

An honest read of the artificial intelligence index of capital flows since 2023 shows a consistent ratchet. Each successive funding round for the top labs has been larger than the last and has reset the sector's valuation anchor. That mechanism has no hard ceiling, but it does not run without limit. What separates this moment from 1999 is that both labs have real enterprise revenue and genuine user traction. The speculation is not weightless.

The trillion-dollar mark, if and when it is crossed, will generate enormous coverage. The more durable question is whether, three years from now, the margin in the artificial intelligence stack will remain at the model layer or migrate to the applications running on top. Infrastructure builders have historically struggled to hold the full value of what they enable.

Frequently asked questions

What is Anthropic's current valuation?
Anthropic closed a $65 billion funding round in late May 2026 at a $965 billion post-money valuation, placing it just below the trillion-dollar threshold.

How do OpenAI and Anthropic's valuations compare?
OpenAI reached an $852 billion valuation earlier in 2026. Anthropic's subsequent raise pushed it ahead on paper, though both remain private companies and these figures reflect investor pricing rather than a public market capitalization.

How concentrated is AI venture capital right now?
The two largest foundation model labs together absorbed 14% of all global venture capital in 2025. Foundation model funding then doubled in Q1 2026 relative to the prior full year, with capital flowing to a shrinking number of recipients.

Who actually benefits from AI infrastructure investment?
That is the central unresolved question. Revenue is growing fast at the model layer, but application-layer companies built on top of foundation models may ultimately capture the larger share of value, as has happened in prior infrastructure cycles.