OpenAi’s investors, the startup led by Sam Altman and best known for ChatGpt, are beginning to have some doubts about its strategic direction. The company, which has reached a valuation of $852 billion, has indeed set an ambitious goal: it wants to defend the dominant position of its chatbot in the consumer market, while simultaneously chasing rival Anthropic in the smaller but potentially more profitable segment of artificial intelligence solutions for businesses.
WHAT INVESTORS THINK
Some OpenAi investors told the Financial Times that they believe this strategy is unfocused and could lead to resource dispersion, exposing the company not only to competition from Anthropic but also from Google, which has developed its own rival chatbot, Gemini.
“You have ChatGpt, a billion-user business growing 50-100 percent a year: what do you need enterprise and coding for?” an anonymous early OpenAi investor told the newspaper. According to him, the company is “completely off track.”
ANTHROPIC’S COMPETITION
OpenAi’s strategic shift towards the corporate market — concretely, focusing on selling its coding agent, Codex, to businesses — is linked to Anthropic’s strong revenue growth. The company’s annualized revenues — led by Dario Amodei and mainly known for the Claude language model — have risen from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to about $30 billion last March, driven precisely by coding tools.
Although the comparison is difficult, since the two companies use different accounting criteria, it seems that Anthropic has surpassed OpenAi, as the latter reported annualized revenue of about $25 billion in February. In this regard, OpenAi’s CFO, Denise Dresser, made very significant statements, accusing Anthropic of overstating its revenues by about $8 billion, including shares generated through partnerships with Amazon and Google.
Beyond comparisons, both OpenAi and Anthropic are losing billions of dollars annually due to enormous expenses for expanding computing capacity, necessary for training and operating artificial intelligence models.
INVESTORS SEEM TO PREFER ANTHROPIC
OpenAi, as mentioned, has a valuation of $852 billion, and at the end of March closed a massive funding round of $122 billion: participants included, among others, processor giant Nvidia and Japanese holding SoftBank. Anthropic’s valuation is instead around $380 billion, significantly lower.
According to the Financial Times, financiers expect OpenAi to reach a valuation of at least $1.2 trillion with its initial public offering, or IPO. However, reaching such a figure may not be easy, as investor demand seems to have shifted towards Anthropic.
IS OPENAI UNFOCUSED?
OpenAi is still ahead in the consumer sector, also because it was the first company to launch an artificial intelligence chatbot for the mass market. But competition is gaining ground: not by chance, last year Altman himself launched a “code red” to restore focus on the core business. Today, however, some investors think OpenAi is unfocused and particularly criticize the acquisition — at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars — of the Tbpn podcast.
– Also read: OpenAi, Tbpn and the narrative war of artificial intelligence
Notably negative was the loss of a $1 billion investment by Disney following the closure of Sora, OpenAi’s service that allowed generating videos with artificial intelligence. Microsoft — which owns over 30 percent of OpenAi — threatened legal action if the exclusivity of their cloud computing agreement were violated by the startup’s new partnership with Amazon. And Nvidia scaled back its capital injection, reducing it from $100 billion to $30 billion. Finally, OpenAi has indefinitely paused Stargate UK, a mega infrastructure project in the United Kingdom, and abandoned the expansion of a plant in Abilene, Texas.
Despite uncertainties and doubts about its strategic direction, OpenAi holds a clear advantage in infrastructure: it has access to 8 gigawatts of computing capacity — a level Anthropic may not reach before 2027 — and aims to reach 30 GW by 2030.
