OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation is facing scrutiny from investors as the company’s evolving strategy raises questions about long-term growth, profitability, and sustainability in the competitive AI market.
Market analysts are pointing out massive operational costs and fierce competition. Despite steady revenue growth, OpenAI's operations are still capital-intensive and highly dependent on investors and funding.
OpenAI’s $852bn valuation is under increasing scrutiny from its own backers. “You have ChatGPT, a 1bn-user business growing 50-100 percent a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?” said one early backer of OpenAI. “It’s a deeply unfocused company.”
One investor who has backed both companies said that, to underwrite an investment in OpenAI’s recent round, they would have to assume an IPO valuation of $1.2tn or more.
“There’s room for both (OpenAI and Anthropic) but there is fundamentally a number 1 and a number 2 dynamic, and the 1 will win disproportionately. We picked. We invested a lot into Anthropic,” said Roy Luo, a partner at Iconiq Capital, which has invested over $1bn into Anthropic and owns a smaller stake in OpenAI.
“Anthropic is enjoying its time in the sun, and we’re being congratulated,” he added. “But everyone was saying the same to OpenAI’s early investors last year.”
“I don’t get it frankly, it doesn’t make any sense to me,” said an OpenAI investor of the TBPN acquisition. “It’s a distraction and it irks me.”
“The company was doing too many things, it had too many bets. It’s about refocusing the business around a couple of core bets,” said another major investor in the group. “That’s it. You can’t as a company compete on 30 different fronts.”
A recent flurry of deals, initiatives and abandoned projects is designed to reorient the company around a new strategy: defend ChatGPT’s dominance among consumers, while taking on Anthropic in the higher-margin market for corporate AI tools. OpenAI has shifted its focus to the enterprise market and is addressing competition from Anthropic.
Anthropic's success has prompted a strategic rethink. The Claude-maker’s annualized revenue surged from $9bn at the end of 2025 to $30bn at the end of March, driven by demand for its coding tools.
Data from secondary marketplaces that trade proxies for both companies’ stock suggests demand is higher for Anthropic. The ChatGPT maker still retains a lead among consumer users.
Altman issued a “code red” late last year, reminding staff to focus on core business. Last month, Fidji Simo, former Instacart chief and OpenAI’s CEO of applications, who is off on medical leave, urged employees to drop “side quests”.
OpenAI’s leadership is bullish, having already successfully repositioned the company multiple times. Chief executive Sam Altman is fresh from securing $122bn last month from more than 25 blue-chip investors including SoftBank, Amazon, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Thrive Capital.
“The suggestion that investors are not supportive of our strategy defies the facts,” said Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer. “Our . . . raise, the largest in history, was oversubscribed, completed in record time and backed by a broad set of global investors, reflecting strong conviction in both our direction, current business momentum and long-term value.”
Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s new chief revenue officer, accused Anthropic of overstating their revenue “by roughly $8bn” by “grossing up (revenue) share with Amazon and Google”, in a note to staff. Dresser also acknowledged Anthropic’s “coding focus gave them an early wedge” in the race for enterprise customers. But, she added, “the market is ours to win”.
The two start-ups are both losing billions of dollars each year, spending aggressively on computing power to train and run models.
Also Read: OpenAI's $500B Valuation: Bubble or Blueprint for AI Supremacy?
Disney’s planned $1bn investment evaporated after OpenAI shuttered its video-generation service, Sora. Microsoft has indicated it will take legal action if OpenAI’s new $50bn partnership with Amazon infringes on its exclusive cloud deal with the company.
Ambitions around Stargate, OpenAI’s $500bn data center effort announced in the White House last year, have also shifted. Plans to develop a data centre in the UK and extend a site in Abilene, Texas, have both been ditched. A $100bn deal with Nvidia has also been substantially pared back.
The company told investors last week that it had secured access to 8 gigawatts of computing capacity as it aims to reach 30GW by the end of 2030. Multiple people familiar with the company’s strategy said Codex might eventually take precedence over ChatGPT, as staff prioritize making the software more accessible for non-technical users.
Expansion continues in other areas as well. OpenAI plans to nearly double its headcount to 8,000 by the end of the year. For now, the market is not buying OpenAI’s present; it is buying its potential to own the future of intelligence. Whether that future is worth $500 billion or priceless depends on how quickly hype translates into habit and innovation into irreplaceability.