Investment demand for OpenAI's unlisted shares is picking up again in the secondary market. Investor attention was concentrated on Anthropic through the first half of this year, but sentiment is shifting back to OpenAI as it rolls out new AI models and grows its enterprise services.

Business Insider reported on July 20 that because OpenAI and Anthropic are not listed, retail investors invest by trading stakes held by existing employees or early investors in the secondary market. Secondary markets have limited volumes and liquidity, so company valuations are estimated from participants' transactions rather than real-time prices like publicly traded stocks.

The market has assessed that investor sentiment shrank sharply in the first quarter as OpenAI faced a combination of negative factors, including worries about slowing growth, management departures, health issues, intensifying competition with Anthropic, and a lawsuit with Elon Musk. Dave McClure (데이브 맥클루어), founder and chief investment officer at Practical Venture Capital, explained that the mood has changed over the past month. He said interest in OpenAI secondary shares fell sharply even in early in the second quarter, but investment demand has recently revived.

Even so, Anthropic still holds the upper hand in the market. Glenn Anderson (글렌 앤더슨), chief executive officer at unlisted-share trading firm Rainmaker Securities, said there are still more investors seeking Anthropic shares than OpenAI. He added that buy bids for OpenAI shares have also risen noticeably compared with a month ago.

Product competitiveness is cited as a backdrop to the recovery in sentiment. OpenAI last month unveiled its flagship model GPT-5.6 Sol, and this month launched GPT-5.6 Terra and the low-cost GPT-5.6 Luna. In an independent benchmark, GPT-5.6 Sol posted top-tier performance, but was assessed as somewhat behind Anthropic's latest models, Claude Mythos and Fable.

Even so, growth in enterprise services is raising investor expectations. Adam Crawley (애덤 크롤리), co-founder of pre-IPO tech trading platform Augment, said investors are returning to OpenAI. Mark Klein (마크 클라인), chief executive officer of Neostella, highlighted OpenAI's disclosure that total active users of its AI coding agent Codex and work platform ChatGPT Work have surpassed 9 million.

Klein said the pace of growth stands out and shows agentic AI expanding beyond early developer-led demand into broader professional workflows. He also assessed that OpenAI appears focused on turning model performance improvements across coding, research and knowledge work into wider real-world use.

Price trends in the secondary market are also shifting. In the past, Anthropic shares often traded at a discount to OpenAI, but some now say OpenAI is relatively undervalued. Some investors are said to be considering a strategy of buying OpenAI shares to hedge their Anthropic holdings.

The valuation gap remains large. Anthropic has recently been valued at about $1.2 trillion in the secondary market, while OpenAI is trading at about $933 billion based on secondary trading platform Caplight. OpenAI's secondary-market valuation has risen about 20 percent over the past three months.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (샘 알트먼) also wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the past 12 months were not the best period in the company's history and that the responsibility largely lies with him, while expressing confidence that the next 12 months will be the best time yet.

Competition is intensifying. On the same day as Altman's remarks, Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI unveiled an open-weight large language model, Kimi K3. McClure forecast that continued offensives by Chinese AI companies and the open-source camp could weigh on OpenAI's growth and profitability.

The market sees the recovery in secondary-market sentiment as reflecting expectations for OpenAI's product competitiveness and the expansion of its enterprise services. But analysts say it needs further confirmation whether OpenAI's rebound will last, as Anthropic continues to draw stronger investment demand and Chinese AI companies and the open-source camp are closing in.