CoreWeave Sell-Off Widens Valuation Gap Between OpenAI and Anthropic

A sell-off in CoreWeave is dragging neocloud stocks lower and widening the valuation spread between AI rivals OpenAI and Anthropic.

OpenAI's valuation fell more than 4% over the past 24 hours after briefly slipping below $1.5 trillion, based on perpetual futures pricing on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid. Anthropic perps rose 2.4% over the same period, recovering an overnight dip and pointing to a valuation just over $2 trillion.

Perpetuals are bets that never expire, maintained by "deployers" on Hyperliquid's blockchain infrastructure who set a funding rate for long or short positions based on a spot "oracle" price drawing on third-party data such as private funding rounds and secondary market transactions.

Open interest in Anthropic contracts exceeds $41 million, more than five times the less than $7 million in OpenAI. The deployer behind these pre-IPO contracts is Entropy IO. TradeXYZ, the platform's most prominent developer, typically does not list pre-IPO perps until S-1s are public, according to David Schamis, CEO of Hyperliquid Strategies. "Liquidity will probably be deeper once TradeXYZ lists these companies," Schamis said.

OpenAI's steeper drop reflects its closer ties to CoreWeave, whose shares hit a new one-year low Thursday, extending a decline to 54%, as concerns mount over its debt-financing strategy. CoreWeave announced a deal in April to power Anthropic's Claude products without disclosing its value; its relationship with OpenAI, worth at least $22 billion as of September 2025, includes a five-year agreement to provide datacenters and technology.

Both sets of perps are down about 15% from last month's highs, according to Hyperliquid pricing.

Source: CNBC