Anthropic’s secondary market valuation has climbed as high as $1.5 trillion, according to traders active in private share transactions — and the more striking detail is how few people are willing to sell at that price.

The company is racing toward what could rank among the largest public offerings ever recorded, and investors are scrambling to establish positions before it happens.

The Numbers

Three secondary traders speaking to Business Insider described valuations reaching $1.5 trillion, representing roughly a 25 percent increase across the past month.

For context, Anthropic’s last formal valuation came in a funding round announced in May at $965 billion. The company filed paperwork to go public in June, with a market debut anticipated within the next few months.

The gap between that $965 billion round and current secondary pricing captures how quickly sentiment has moved.

The Supply Problem

What makes this situation unusual is not the price. It is the absence of sellers at that price.

Glen Anderson, chief executive of Rainmaker Securities, a merchant bank specialising in private securities, described the few sellers on his books as sitting around the $1.5 trillion mark — and noted that even at that level, sellers remain scarce.

That dynamic explains the trajectory. When demand rises against a nearly fixed supply of available shares, price does most of the adjusting.

Why Buyers Are Rushing

The motivation is straightforward enough.

Adam Crawley, president of Augment, a marketplace for private share investment, said people are trying to position themselves ahead of the IPO.

Pre-IPO positioning is a familiar strategy with a familiar logic: acquire exposure before public listing, in the expectation that a debut prices above the last private mark. It is also a strategy that carries no guarantee, since IPO pricing frequently disappoints late private buyers.

How These Trades Actually Work

Because Anthropic remains private, most investors cannot buy directly. They transact on secondary markets, purchasing existing stock from employees or early backers.

The quality of those transactions varies considerably.

Some are straightforward. Others have involved structures that deserve scrutiny — deals carrying high fees and complicated ownership arrangements built as special-purpose vehicles, or SPVs, which pool investor funds for a single transaction.

The concern with layered SPVs is that a buyer may end up several steps removed from the underlying shares, with limited visibility into what they actually own.

Anthropic’s Own Warning

The company declined to comment for the story. But it has grown noticeably more direct on its website about unauthorised stock sales and investment scams.

That shift matters. When a company begins publicly cautioning about how its own shares are being traded, it usually indicates that the volume of questionable activity has become significant.

Buyers Getting Pickier

Some investors are responding to those signals by tightening their criteria.

Aman Verjee, a general partner at Practical Venture Capital, described a bifurcation in demand. Many buyers now insist on direct cap table exposure — meaning their ownership appears on the company’s actual shareholder register rather than sitting behind intermediary layers.

Appetite for nested SPVs offering indirect exposure, weaker reporting rights, or access to earlier rounds and common shares has softened. Verjee said he sees little demand for that category at $1.5 trillion, though not none.

That distinction is the interesting part of the story. The headline valuation applies to clean, direct exposure. Structurally inferior paper trades at a discount, even for the same underlying company.

The Competitive Backdrop

The valuation climb is happening despite meaningful competitive pressure.

OpenAI’s Codex, its counterpart to Claude Code, reached 5 million monthly active users in June. Its recent models — GPT-5.6 Terra and the cheaper GPT-5.6 Luna — have been received well.

From China, Moonshot AI has emerged as a more serious challenger, with its Kimi models gaining ground as a substantially cheaper alternative.

That last development is arguably the more structurally significant. Cheap, capable open-weight models compete on a different axis than frontier labs, applying pressure to pricing rather than to capability rankings.

How OpenAI Compares

OpenAI has also seen renewed secondary interest this summer, but its price behaviour has been different.

According to Crawley, its valuation has stayed relatively flat, hovering near the $852 billion mark set in its March funding round — with more supply available.

That contrast is instructive. Two companies, similar sector, similar investor enthusiasm, but divergent price action. The difference appears to lie substantially in how much stock is actually available to buy.

What Scarcity Actually Signals

There are two readings of a market where almost nobody sells.

The optimistic interpretation is conviction. Employees and early investors holding through a pending IPO believe the public debut will price higher, and see no reason to exit early.

The cautious interpretation is thinness. Prices set by a small number of transactions in an illiquid market are less reliable indicators of value than prices set by deep two-sided trading. A $1.5 trillion mark established across a handful of deals rests on narrower evidence than the number suggests.

Both can be true simultaneously.

What the IPO Will Settle

The public listing will resolve much of this ambiguity, and quickly.

An IPO creates genuine liquidity, brings in a far broader pool of buyers and sellers, and produces a price discovered continuously rather than deal by deal.

Whoever bought at $1.5 trillion will find out within days of the debut whether the secondary market was leading the public market or getting ahead of it.