Anthropic Is the Hottest Trade in Private Markets — but SpaceX's Coming IPO Could Disrupt Everything

The secondary market for private company shares has reached a level of activity that Glen Anderson, president of Rainmaker Securities, describes as unprecedented in his firm's history — and at the center of that market is a single dominant trade: Anthropic.

Anderson's assessment, published in an interview with TechCrunch, positions Anthropic as the clearest expression of what institutional and retail investors seeking AI exposure without public market volatility are chasing. The company's most recent fundraising rounds valued it at figures that, in normal market conditions, would suggest an imminent IPO. Anthropic has shown no urgency to go public, which has made its secondary market the venue of choice for investors who want in before any eventual listing.

OpenAI Losing Ground

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding in Anderson's market read is that OpenAI — which has historically commanded premium secondary valuations as the brand-name AI investment — is losing secondary market enthusiasm relative to Anthropic. The reasons are speculative but plausible: OpenAI's organizational complexity (the nonprofit parent, the ongoing restructuring, the board dynamics) creates governance uncertainty that institutional buyers discount. Anthropic's structure is cleaner and its safety-first positioning, which was once read as a competitive liability, has increasingly been reframed as a governance asset as regulatory scrutiny of AI intensifies.

The relative shift does not mean OpenAI secondary shares are declining in absolute terms — the AI sector's overall secondary demand is high enough to lift all boats. But the marginal dollar of AI-focused secondary investment is, by Anderson's account, more likely to go to Anthropic than it was 12 months ago.

The SpaceX Variable

The most significant near-term risk to this secondary market dynamic is not another AI company — it is SpaceX. Anderson's analysis identifies a looming SpaceX IPO as the single factor most likely to reshape liquidity dynamics across the private secondary market. SpaceX's combination of scale, brand recognition, and the gravitational pull of Elon Musk's public profile means that when the IPO arrives, it will absorb a significant share of the institutional capital currently parked in private secondaries.

That reallocation will not necessarily hurt Anthropic's secondary price — it may simply reduce trading volume and tighten liquidity. But for smaller private AI companies that have been benefiting from the overflow of demand that can't get filled through Anthropic and OpenAI, a SpaceX IPO that drains the secondary market pool is a real risk to their own secondary valuations.

The Underlying Signal

What secondary market dynamics reveal about the AI sector is something public market valuations obscure: the genuine conviction level among sophisticated investors who are willing to hold illiquid positions and cannot exit easily. Secondary market premiums are not driven by retail momentum or options positioning — they reflect the considered view of institutional allocators about the long-term value trajectory of these companies. The current Anthropic premium, by that measure, represents a substantial bet that the company's safety-differentiated positioning and research capabilities will translate into durable competitive advantage.