OpenAI demand sinks on secondary market as Anthropic runs hot (bloomberg.com)

by helsinkiandrew 60 comments 139 points
Read article View on HN

60 comments

[−] Robdel12 44d ago
This, to me, reads like the CEOs that are catching up to months ago.

I was subbed to claude for CC since July/aug (can’t remember when I stopped paying the API pricing).

I canceled 3 weeks ago. Since then everything with the usage limits being slashed before being announced, their cache bug that eats limits (and won’t reset), and just rolling paper cuts with every single release I feel pretty good.

I personally think Anthropic is lost and are chucking products out left and right. They might vibe their moment away

Edit: their last month of releases for CC are heavily favored towards building openclaw into their ecosystem

[−] Aurornis 44d ago
Most people I talk to who pay for their own subscriptions have switched providers at least once, or they keep 2 or 3 plans active from different companies so they can try them all out.

It’s interesting how the long business purchasing cycles and have made it difficult for companies to keep up with these rapid changes. Companies like to spend months getting a vendor approved and then not change it for years. Depending on when your company got on the AI coding bandwagon you may be locked into Copilot or ChatGPT while the rest of the coding world knows that Opus 4.6 is king, at least for this month. The situation may change again next month, but today that’s how it goes.

[−] WinstonSmith84 44d ago
Indeed .. my company got on Cursor when Cursor's fame started to fade. We've just got out of Cursor now to go on Claude, and I feel like we are again "buying the top"
[−] GenerWork 44d ago
I dropped Claude Code months ago. I'm just an amateur who plays around with bringing screens in from Figma and turning them into websites so I can get practice with AI tooling, but their limits were absurdly low on the $20 plan. Codex, for now, is much better in terms of daily limits.
[−] strongpigeon 44d ago
The amount of tokens you get on Codex for $20/mo compared to Claude Code is indeed insane.
[−] afavour 44d ago
And probably unsustainable. OpenAI desperately needs to catch up so they’ll throw yet more cash at it, while Anthropic are market leaders in this particular space.
[−] GenerWork 44d ago
It probably is unsustainable, but until they change it I'm sticking with Codex.
[−] BoorishBears 44d ago
I suspect GPT-5 models are sparser and/or smaller than Opus which is why they can afford to give away so much usage.
[−] mountlatmus 44d ago
[flagged]
[−] BoredPositron 44d ago
I sound like a broken recorded in these threads but the $20 dollar Google AI Pro is unbelievable good value. You get more Claude tokens in antigravity than you get with the pro subscription from anthropic AND you can share it with your family for free and they also get the same amount of tokens. That's 5x the tokens for just $20.
[−] port11 43d ago
That was indeed the case until last week. AGY right now hits the limits super fast on the Pro plan. I’ve had to start using Gemini CLI all the time, and am now considering what’s next.

It feels like we’ve sped-run the golden age of Claude and AGY.

[−] yalogin 44d ago
I don’t know why anyone would want to invest in OpenAI on the open market. They are wildly over priced, very much in the red, don’t have the momentum at this time. Their pitch is “trust us even though we are losing money every quarter we are building the user moat”. That is not their strength at this point. Llms have shown they are $ hungry and only enterprises have a proper use case for them. As evident from anthropic, even the $20 per month is not enough to sustain the token usage as they put limits. So OpenAI is far away in that race and their enterprise adoption is just chat, which is barely useful. So not sure what their pitch or near term target should be. Oh don’t forget they are also pushing on hardware and robots which are also huge cash sinks
[−] harmonic18374 44d ago
Yes, most of their top talent has left, except for Jakub. The top researchers I know have no interest in the company.
[−] tim333 44d ago
Yeah, and Jakub didn't seem to have much background in AI research. I'm sure he's a great coder and did a PhD on fast algorithms but it's a different area to pushing forward AI really.
[−] Aurornis 44d ago
Open market investing in private markets is kind of a dumpster fire everywhere. The offering prices are way too high, the contorted investment vehicles can skim a lot of your investment, and the platforms may not even be able to get the shares you bought because the company exercises right of first refusal.

It’s mostly a FOMO play for people who think they need to have some exposure to these companies they see all over the news.

[−] vrganj 44d ago
I generally think the frontier model labs are doomed as businesses. There's just no economic case for them, especially when a few months later open source models catch up.
[−] intothemild 44d ago
Yup. It's not trivial now to setup a system where you can get a frontier model to help do the research, draft a spec, humans read and comment on the spec, and then you get an open model to do the grunt work.

If the spec is very detailed, you've solved most of the problems you might encounter with open models.

You can then get a frontier model to then do a review against the spec.

Doing this cuts down frontier usage by a lot, as all the real work is local, tool calls are instant . It just feels nicer.

I think this is why you're seeing frontier models like Claude suddenly ban people using opencode/pi etc with a subscription (API users still good).

[−] afavour 44d ago

> I don’t know why anyone would want to invest in OpenAI on the open market

I can only assume hype. That’s why Sam Altman has the job he has. You don’t see the CEO of Anthropic going on the Tonight Show. He’s there to bring OpenAI to the forefront of people’s minds, and uninformed investors will follow.

All catches up to you eventually though.

[−] strongpigeon 44d ago
I they tread very carefully, I do think their free+ads strategy has a huge potential payoff.
[−] raincole 44d ago

> The large gap between OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation and Anthropic’s $380 billion has investors rushing to grab equity in the latter before it rises, according to Augment co-founder Adam Crawley.

That's the only thing you need to get from this article. They're doing mostly the same thing, aiming the same market. But Anthropic's shares are at 50% off discount.

[−] Liftyee 44d ago
[−] donkeyboy 44d ago
I think the main point is that these two companies have been thought of as equals. Yet OpenAI has a 850B valuation while Anthropic has a 380B valuation. So that means either OAI is overvalued, or Anthropic is undervalued. If you believe they are roughly equal, then it makes sense to have demand for Anthropic.
[−] throwaway2027 44d ago
I just switch between Gemini, Codex, Claude, Z.AI, ... whichever offers the best value.
[−] neya 44d ago
Man, for some reason the ass kissing of Claude is just insane. Claude this, Claude that. I do Elixir for a living and Claude is just absolutely garbage in comparison to Gemini Pro. But hey, everyone hates Google - despite them being the only model provider that is competent and the one that explicitly states for paid providers that they do not use any of our data for training right under the chatbox.

And Anthropic isn't even the saint that everyone pitches them out to be:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...

[−] vlaaad 44d ago
So a buy order for $122000M, and a sell order for $600M is presented as bad news for OpenAI?