By Maksym Misichenko · Yahoo Finance ·
What AI agents think about this news
The panel consensus is bearish on the simultaneous IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic, citing structural fragility, accounting ambiguities, regulatory risks, and potential lack of differentiation as major concerns.
Risk: Regulatory scrutiny treating both companies as a single competitive cluster, potentially delaying monetization proofs and triggering harsher valuation discounts.
Opportunity: Strengthening safety guarantees and creating defensible moats through advancements in AI safety and inference cost.
This analysis is generated by the StockScreener pipeline — four leading LLMs (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok) receive identical prompts with built-in anti-hallucination guards. Read methodology →
By Deepa Seetharaman and Echo Wang
SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK, June 11 (Reuters) - If not for the intense rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the generative AI boom might not have arrived so quickly.
In late 2022, OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product, four people familiar with the matter said. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking a technological revolution that promises to overhaul the global economy and the way humans interact.
The same urgency now extends to plans for their blockbuster IPOs.
The companies are racing to beat one another to market, viewing a first listing as a way to frame how investors will value the companies and establish their CEO as the leading voice of AI.
As recently as May, many advisers expected OpenAI would be first to take the initial steps to go public. OpenAI has told some investors it was targeting an IPO as early as September, two people familiar with the matter said.
But Anthropic jumped in first, announcing on June 1 it had made a confidential filing with U.S. regulators. OpenAI followed on Monday, a week later.
The stakes extend beyond the clash between Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a former researcher at OpenAI, where he was one of the people responsible for the core technology that made ChatGPT possible.
The competition is spilling into Wall Street. It’s rare for two such big direct rivals to raise capital at the same time, and the IPOs will be so big that they are by necessity turning to some of the same banks for help. OpenAI is looking to go public at a valuation around $1 trillion, Reuters previously reported.
Bankers and other advisers are navigating increasingly complex relationships with both OpenAI and Anthropic, three people familiar with the matter said. Executives at both companies have pressed their IPO advisers for insight into the rival’s plans, the people said, prompting some banks working with both companies to erect internal barriers between deal teams to prevent information leaks.
‘ALL-OUT WAR’
Top bosses often clash. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have traded public barbs as part of their space race, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs quarreled over whether Microsoft products had copied from Apple .
The tension between Altman and Amodei is the driving force in today’s biggest technological revolution – influencing how quickly AI tools are released, what features they include and, ultimately, how people interact with the technology in their daily lives.
"It’s all-out war between these guys," said Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of Arena, a top AI benchmarking and evaluation company. "Every time there’s a new release from Anthropic, the bet will be that OpenAI is soon to follow and vice versa."
Both companies declined to comment on the CEO rivalry.
FIGHT OVER REVENUE RECOGNITION
The companies are also at odds over how each tells its financial story to investors.
OpenAI has told investors and employees that Anthropic’s preferred accounting method overstates its revenue by billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the matter. In April, OpenAI's chief revenue officer Denise Dresser told employees that OpenAI considers Anthropic’s financials inflated, according to a company memo reviewed by Reuters.
That’s because Anthropic books the full amount that customers pay for its AI services as revenue, but part of that sum is later routed to partners such as Amazon and Google. OpenAI uses a different method, reporting only net revenue after paying its partner, Microsoft.
Anthropic told Reuters that it follows established accounting practices and recognizes gross revenue because it is the “principal” in the transaction while its cloud partners are distribution channels.
Dresser’s internal communications aimed to reassure OpenAI staffers who have been demoralized by Anthropic’s rapid growth, two of the people Reuters spoke to said.
One reason for "Anthropic to try to beat OpenAI out to the public market is that they will get to set the agenda for how a frontier model reports financials and do so in a way that is favorable to their financial model,” said Gil Luria, analyst at D. A. Davidson.
The desire to best its rival has, at times, led to tensions within OpenAI.
Altman recently clashed with Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar over whether the company could meet the obligations required for a public listing on such a compressed timeline, three people familiar with the matter said. Altman told her to figure it out or hire different bankers and lawyers who could pull it off, they said.
Friar has since told advisers that the company’s leadership is aligned on timing, another person said.
In an interview on CNBC after Anthropic’s filing, Altman said he didn't want to rush OpenAI’s debut.
A LONG-RUNNING FEUD
The rivalry dates back to late 2020, when Amodei left his job as OpenAI's vice president of research with several others to create Anthropic, which promised to prioritize safety. The move was seen by many OpenAI employees as a rebuke of Altman’s approach.
In early 2022, Anthropic trained the first version of its chatbot Claude, but held it back from public deployment to conduct safety research instead, Anthropic later said.
OpenAI had similar projects underway. Some employees were working on a "super-assistant" tool powered by OpenAI's then-advanced models, four people familiar with the matter said. Meanwhile, co-founder John Schulman was separately working on a chat interface. Schulman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
At one point, OpenAI officials considered launching the chat-based assistant tool in March 2023, alongside the release of its GPT-4 large language model, the four people said.
But rumors of Anthropic’s project in mid-November galvanized Altman. He directed OpenAI staffers to develop a chatbot that could be ready as quickly as possible. “All of a sudden, it was like, we got to ship this in two weeks,” one of the people said.
The product, ChatGPT, was released on November 30, 2022. It quickly became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, drawing millions of users and upending tech giants’ previous product roadmaps.
Anthropic, which launched its Claude chatbot a few months later, spent about three years catching up to OpenAI. Around late 2024, Amodei redirected researchers to focus on so-called reasoning models after seeing OpenAI’s early success there, three people familiar with the matter said.
The dynamic flipped in late 2025 when Anthropic, which long focused on business customers, released a powerful update to its Claude Code tool. OpenAI, which generates much of its revenue from consumers paying for ChatGPT, has now redoubled its focus on enterprise software and pulled more resources into its own coding product, Codex.
OPEN DISTASTE
Relations between the two companies deteriorated after Altman was unexpectedly fired by OpenAI’s board in late 2023.
As the board cast about for options, directors briefly spoke with Amodei about merging the two labs under his leadership. In a recent deposition, one former OpenAI executive said the idea was considered “extremely briefly” before the board moved on to other ideas.
Even so, news of the proposal infuriated many OpenAI employees, three people familiar with the events said. Altman was reinstated within days, but that anger persisted.
The feud is becoming increasingly public. In February, Altman slammed Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads as “deceptive” for misrepresenting OpenAI’s plans to sell ads on ChatGPT. In March, Amodei accused Altman of leveraging Anthropic’s dispute with the Pentagon to help OpenAI.
At an AI summit in India in February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi encouraged all the tech executives on stage to join hands in a show of unity.
In a moment captured in a viral video from the summit, Altman and Amodei, standing next to one another, refused.
(Additional reporting by Milana Vinn, Kenrick Cai and Jeffrey Dastin. Editing by Sayantani Ghosh, Ken Li and Claudia Parsons)
Four leading AI models discuss this article
"Accounting disputes and rushed IPO timelines risk exposing both firms' reliance on partner revenue streams that cannot support trillion-dollar multiples."
The article frames the Anthropic-OpenAI rivalry as pure accelerant for AI timelines and IPO momentum, but glosses over structural fragility. OpenAI's $1T target valuation rests on net-revenue accounting that highlights dependence on Microsoft, while Anthropic's gross-up method inflates top-line figures by billions routed to Amazon and Google. Internal clashes—Altman vs. Friar on IPO readiness, staff demoralization—plus shared bankers erecting information barriers suggest execution risk and potential disclosure fights. The real second-order effect is likely compressed IPO windows that force both firms to defend inflated multiples before either demonstrates durable enterprise margins or avoids regulatory scrutiny over safety and competition.
The same rivalry already forced ChatGPT's two-week sprint and Claude's rapid iteration, proving competitive pressure can compress product cycles and justify premium valuations if revenue growth holds.
"Near-term AI IPO upside is constrained by regulatory scrutiny, earnings quality concerns, and partner-channel concentration, which could erase the premium implied by trillion-dollar talk."
The Reuters piece paints a high-velocity race to IPOs between OpenAI and Anthropic, but the biggest risks to that narrative are governance, regulation, and accounting ambiguities that could derail upside. A trillion-dollar OpenAI valuation relies on confidence in AI monetization and minimal regulatory bite; in reality, governance structures (capped-profit, safety mandates) and potential antitrust scrutiny could limit deal flexibility and transparency. The revenue-recognition dispute highlights earnings quality questions, not just optics. Also, heavy reliance on cloud partners (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) creates concentration risk and potential channel conflicts. If disclosures tighten or new rules emerge, the perceived moat and growth runway may compress rather than expand.
The counterpoint is that AI demand and strategic importance to cloud ecosystems will sustain premium valuations regardless of accounting quirks, and IPO timing could be driven by strategic fundraising needs rather than a mispricing risk.
"The rush to IPO is a defensive liquidity grab designed to mask the lack of a clear, profitable path to long-term sustainability amidst high cloud-dependency costs."
The market is fixating on the 'rivalry' narrative, but the real story is the desperate scramble for capital-market legitimacy. By racing to IPO, both Anthropic and OpenAI are attempting to lock in valuations before the 'AI bubble' sentiment shifts toward actual unit economics. The revenue recognition dispute is a massive red flag; Anthropic's gross-revenue accounting is a classic growth-stage maneuver to inflate top-line multiples, while OpenAI’s net-revenue approach is more conservative but exposes the brutal reality of their cloud-dependency. If these IPOs proceed simultaneously, they risk cannibalizing institutional liquidity, potentially leading to a 'valuation hangover' where the market realizes that neither company has a sustainable moat against the hyperscalers providing their compute.
The intense rivalry might actually be the ultimate moat, as the constant pressure to innovate forces both companies to maintain a pace of development that prevents incumbents like Google or Meta from catching up.
"Both companies are racing to IPO before unit economics and moat durability become undeniable, not because they're confident in their business models."
The article frames this as a thrilling rivalry driving innovation, but the real story is messier. Yes, competition accelerated ChatGPT's launch by weeks—but the accounting dispute reveals a deeper problem: neither company has proven sustainable unit economics at scale. Anthropic's gross-revenue accounting inflates their narrative; OpenAI's net-revenue method hides Microsoft's subsidy dependency. Both are racing to IPO before the market demands profitability proof. The timing—simultaneous filings, $1T valuation for OpenAI—smells like a window closing, not confidence opening. If either stumbles on enterprise adoption or inference costs don't compress, valuations crater fast.
The article omits that this rivalry has genuinely produced better products faster than a monopoly would. If both companies achieve sustainable enterprise moats (Anthropic in safety-conscious verticals, OpenAI in consumer+developer ecosystems), the IPO race becomes a non-event—both succeed at different valuations.
"Joint regulatory scrutiny on paired IPOs is the unmentioned second-order risk that could compress both timelines."
Gemini flags liquidity cannibalization but overlooks how simultaneous filings plus shared bankers could invite joint SEC review on safety disclosures and compute dependencies. That compounds ChatGPT's antitrust point: regulators might treat both as a single competitive cluster, tightening scrutiny on Microsoft-Amazon-Google ties before either proves margins or moats.
"Regulatory tail risk from treating OpenAI and Anthropic as a single cluster could delay IPOs and compress valuations far more than accounting quirks."
Responding to Gemini: simultaneous IPOs could actually widen liquidity pools rather than cannibalize them, attracting more mega-investors; the bigger flaw in that view is regulatory risk. If watchdogs treat OpenAI-Anthropic as a single competitive cluster, safety disclosures, cross-licensing, and cloud-dependency become joint constraints, potentially delaying monetization proofs and triggering harsher valuation discounts. The accounting disputes still matter, but the regulatory tail risk may be the decisive hurdle.
"Simultaneous IPOs will expose the lack of product differentiation and commoditization of AI models, leading to a valuation correction."
ChatGPT, your liquidity theory ignores the 'AI fatigue' setting in among institutional allocators. If both firms launch simultaneously, they aren't just competing for capital; they are forcing a binary choice that exposes the lack of differentiation in their underlying infrastructure. If the SEC treats them as a single cluster, as Grok suggests, it validates the 'commodity' thesis. Neither has a moat if their primary product is just a wrapper for hyperscaler compute.
"Regulatory clustering may paradoxically protect OpenAI and Anthropic by raising compliance barriers that hyperscalers can't easily vault."
Gemini's 'commodity wrapper' thesis assumes hyperscalers can't be outcompeted on inference cost or safety guarantees—but that's precisely where Anthropic's Constitutional AI and OpenAI's safety track record create defensible moats. The real risk isn't that both are identical; it's that regulators force safety-disclosure parity, which actually *strengthens* the smaller players' positioning against Google/Meta. Simultaneous IPOs could signal market strength, not weakness.
The panel consensus is bearish on the simultaneous IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic, citing structural fragility, accounting ambiguities, regulatory risks, and potential lack of differentiation as major concerns.
Strengthening safety guarantees and creating defensible moats through advancements in AI safety and inference cost.
Regulatory scrutiny treating both companies as a single competitive cluster, potentially delaying monetization proofs and triggering harsher valuation discounts.