Key Takeaways:
Polymarket traders now assign Anthropic a 69 percent probability of going public by year-end versus just 19 percent for OpenAI, a gap that has widened as the two AI labs prepare what could be the largest listings in market history.
"If I was the head of Anthropic or OpenAI, I'd be petrified. That spells to me price war," Steve Eisman, the investor known for the "Big Short," said on his show Real Eisman Playbook, pointing to Chinese rivals undercutting frontier model pricing.
Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC on June 1 and targets an October NASDAQ listing off a $965 billion private valuation, potentially the first company to debut publicly at $1 trillion or more. OpenAI followed with its own confidential filing in early June but has wavered toward a 2027 debut, with CEO Sam Altman reportedly holding a "hard floor" of $1 trillion. OpenAI's CFO Sarah Friar told employees in July that monthly annualized recurring revenue exceeded the entire second quarter, driven by the GPT-5.6 family, ChatGPT Work, and Codex adoption.
The 50-point spread on Polymarket matters because public investors will price AI moats directly for the first time. If Anthropic lists first at a $1 trillion-plus valuation and OpenAI follows at a discount, it could reset how the entire AI sector is priced — and the betting market already expects that outcome.
OpenAI's internal numbers tell a story of acceleration: July ARR surpassed all of Q2, which itself delivered strong results, according to Friar's employee update reported by CNBC. The company's valuation stands above $800 billion. Yet the market's confidence in a near-term listing has not followed.
Anthropic, by contrast, closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $960 billion post-money valuation in late May, four days before its confidential SEC filing. The company's compounding growth trajectory has given Polymarket traders confidence in an October window, even as broader tech volatility has pushed some analysts to question whether any AI company can sustain a trillion-dollar valuation.
The divergence extends to how each company is navigating competitive pressure. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 charges $3 per million input tokens versus $5 for OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and $10 for Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, according to Eisman. Moonshot also released full model weights, letting developers run the model independently rather than staying locked to a closed platform.
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Robert Lee argued on Bloomberg's The Asia Trade that the commoditization Eisman fears is already playing out in China. "There's a high level of commoditization in the AI sector. The sector is overpopulated, flooded with supply. At last count there were 988 large language models officially approved by China," Lee said. Baidu cut API pricing by 99 percent earlier in 2026, while DeepSeek cut pricing by as much as 50 percent.
The bull case rests on scale absorbing price pressure. OpenAI and Anthropic have a combined revenue run rate above $75 billion, up from zero two years ago, according to D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria. Alphabet's Gemini is processing 22 billion API tokens per minute with 950 million monthly active users on the Gemini App, while cloud revenue grew 82 percent year over year to $24.77 billion. Alibaba's Qwen open-source family has surpassed 1 billion cumulative Hugging Face downloads.
The last time prediction markets diverged this sharply on two competing listings was the SpaceX versus Databricks race in mid-2025, when traders correctly called SpaceX's June debut ahead of Databricks. Anthropic's October window now becomes the key test: if it slips, Polymarket's 69 percent probability will adjust quickly, and the entire AI IPO pipeline could follow.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
