Investors Question OpenAI Valuation
Some of OpenAI’s backers are scrutinising the company’s reported $852 billion valuation as it shifts focus toward enterprise customers, according to reporting that cites the Financial Times. The coverage says investors worry the company is moving from model prestige toward revenue and strategic coherence in a market crowded by rivals like Anthropic. (reuters.com)
OpenAI’s reported $852 billion valuation is drawing questions from some of its own investors as the company shifts harder toward selling to businesses. (reuters.com) Reuters, citing the Financial Times on Tuesday, said backers are scrutinizing whether that price matches OpenAI’s current strategy as competition from Anthropic intensifies. The report said investors are weighing a move away from model prestige toward enterprise revenue and a clearer product plan. (reuters.com) That scrutiny lands just over a year after OpenAI said it had raised $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation on March 31, 2025. OpenAI said that financing was backed by SoftBank and tied to scaling research, compute infrastructure, and products for 500 million weekly ChatGPT users. (openai.com) A valuation is the price investors assign to a company before its shares trade publicly, and in artificial intelligence that price often rests on future growth as much as current sales. For OpenAI, the investor debate now centers on whether corporate subscriptions, software tools, and application programming interface sales can support a far larger number than last year’s $300 billion mark. (openai.com; reuters.com) OpenAI has spent the past two years turning ChatGPT from a consumer chatbot into a workplace product line. Its business offerings now include ChatGPT Business, ChatGPT Enterprise, and paid application programming interface access, and OpenAI said in November 2025 that more than 1 million business customers were using its products. (openai.com; openai.com) The pressure is coming from rivals that are winning more corporate budgets. Anthropic said last week that its revenue run rate had passed $30 billion, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, and that more than 1,000 business customers were each spending over $1 million a year on an annualized basis. (anthropic.com) Axios reported on March 18 that Anthropic was capturing more than 73% of spending from companies buying artificial intelligence tools for the first time, citing Ramp customer data. That result pointed to a market where enterprise adoption, not just consumer popularity, is shaping the leaderboard. (axios.com) OpenAI has kept emphasizing its scale on both the consumer and workplace sides. In December 2025, the company said ChatGPT was serving more than 800 million users every week and said enterprise adoption was accelerating across sectors including professional services, finance, and technology. (openai.com) The company has not publicly confirmed the $852 billion figure in its own announcement materials, and the Reuters report attributes that number to Financial Times reporting and investor discussions. OpenAI’s most recently confirmed valuation in its own March 2025 post was $300 billion. (reuters.com; openai.com) For investors, the question is no longer only whether OpenAI builds the most watched models. It is whether the company can turn that reach into durable business revenue fast enough to justify a valuation that has become part of the story itself. (reuters.com; openai.com; anthropic.com)
