Anthropic Is the Hottest Trade in Private Markets — But SpaceX's Looming IPO Could Change Everything

The secondary market for private company shares has never been more active, and Anthropic is at the center of it. According to Glen Anderson, president of Rainmaker Securities, Anthropic has emerged as the single hottest trade in private secondary markets — with demand for its shares outpacing every other private company, including former market darlings like OpenAI and Stripe.

What's Driving Anthropic Demand

Several converging factors explain Anthropic's secondary market dominance. The company has assembled one of the most impressive investor bases in venture history — Amazon has committed $4 billion, Google has invested $2 billion, and Spark Capital, General Catalyst, and others have participated across multiple rounds. That investor quality signals institutional confidence that is highly legible to secondary market participants.

More fundamentally, Anthropic's recent product trajectory has been strong. Claude has moved from a respected but distant second in the consumer LLM market to a genuine enterprise and developer-preferred option in many categories. Claude Code's rapid adoption among software engineers is a particularly concrete metric — developer-preferred AI tools tend to generate durable enterprise revenue rather than fickle consumer adoption.

The company's safety-focused positioning is also increasingly valuable in the regulatory environment taking shape. As AI governance frameworks develop, being the company with credible safety credentials is a competitive moat, not just a PR positioning.

OpenAI Is Losing Secondary Market Ground

The same sources that place Anthropic at the top of secondary market demand note that OpenAI is losing ground as a secondary market trade. This is a notable reversal — OpenAI dominated private market attention throughout 2023 and much of 2024. The shift reflects a combination of valuation concerns (OpenAI's last round implied a $157 billion valuation that many secondary buyers believe is optimistic) and competitive concerns about the sustainability of its market position as Anthropic, Google, and Meta close the capability gap.

The SpaceX IPO Threat

The single most significant risk to secondary market appetite for Anthropic shares isn't competition or regulation — it's SpaceX's looming IPO. SpaceX's Starlink business generates substantial and growing revenue, making it one of the few late-stage private companies with undeniable fundamental value at its valuation. When SpaceX goes public, it is likely to absorb significant capital that would otherwise flow into private secondary markets — including Anthropic shares.

The timing of SpaceX's IPO is uncertain, but the appetite it will command is not. For Anthropic shareholders looking for secondary liquidity, the window before that event may be the most favorable they'll see for some time.