Institutional investors are sitting on roughly $6 billion in OpenAI shares they cannot sell. Bloomberg reported on April 1 that OpenAI shares have “fallen out of favor on the secondary market — in some cases becoming almost impossible to unload — as investors pivot quickly to Anthropic, its biggest competitor.”
The numbers are stark. Ken Smythe, founder of secondary trading platform Next Round Capital, told Bloomberg that about half a dozen hedge funds and venture capital firms contacted his firm in recent weeks looking to offload a combined $6 billion in OpenAI shares. His firm, which has processed $2.5 billion in transactions, could not find a single buyer across its pool of hundreds of institutional investors. “Last year, these shares would have been snapped up in days,” Smythe said. Other secondary platforms including Augment and Hiive have reported similar drops in demand.
$20 Billion Waiting for Anthropic
The capital isn’t disappearing. It’s moving. Buyers have told Next Round Capital they have up to $20 billion in cash ready to invest in Anthropic, according to Bloomberg’s reporting. Augment co-founder Adam Crawley attributed the shift to the valuation gap: OpenAI sits at approximately $852 billion post-money after its record $122 billion raise, while Anthropic’s valuation is around $380 billion. “The risk-reward is better now,” Crawley told Bloomberg. “People are betting Anthropic’s valuation will catch up to OpenAI’s. But if you buy OpenAI shares, the near-term return is less clear.”
The fee structures tell the same story. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have begun offering OpenAI shares to wealth management clients without charging a carry fee — the 15-20% performance fee that’s standard for private placements. Banks waive carry when they need to move inventory. Goldman continues charging its standard carry on Anthropic placements.
What This Means for the Agent Platform Race
This is a market-level bet on which company’s infrastructure will underpin the next generation of autonomous AI agents. Anthropic’s Claude powers a growing share of the agent ecosystem, from Claude Code to the tool-use and orchestration layers that developers building on platforms like OpenClaw rely on daily. Techi’s analysis of the OpenAI IPO landscape notes that OpenAI scores weakest on business quality fundamentals among the three major AI IPO candidates (OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks) despite commanding the highest valuation — and has never publicly disclosed its enterprise customer retention rate.
Private market investors aren’t making a call on chatbot quality. They’re making a call on which platform will capture the infrastructure layer for agents at scale. The $20 billion in cash waiting for Anthropic suggests they think the answer is Claude.