TL;DR: OpenAI has reportedly pulled in $11 billion of a new funding round that still hasn’t closed, putting the company at a $1.25 trillion valuation, according to Bloomberg. The round could grow to roughly $20 billion in the coming weeks, but OpenAI has reportedly cut its own fundraising target by about $10 billion and dropped its proposed valuation down from $1.4 trillion. The same day, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic’s IPO valuation expectations are getting squeezed too, falling from around $2 trillion in early October to somewhere between $1.2 and $1.3 trillion now. Fresh data from corporate card company Ramp shows why: enterprise AI token spending basically flatlined over the summer.
Two of the biggest names in AI got a reality check on the same Friday, and the timing says more than either headline does on its own.
Bloomberg reported that OpenAI has raised $11 billion so far in a new funding round, with sources telling the outlet the total could reach about $20 billion once it closes in the coming weeks. That would value the company at $1.25 trillion. No investors have been named yet, and OpenAI hasn’t confirmed the numbers publicly. TechCrunch, which surfaced the report, said it had asked OpenAI for comment and would update if the company responds.
The gap between that number and OpenAI’s earlier ambitions is the real story. Back in September, Bloomberg reported OpenAI was seeking $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation. Three months later, per a Financial Times report cited alongside the Bloomberg numbers, OpenAI has cut its fundraising goal by roughly $10 billion and lowered its proposed valuation to $1.25 trillion. OpenAI has raised money almost every few months this year, each round bigger and faster than the last, so a round that’s taking longer to close and landing below its own target is worth noticing even before the ink dries.
Anthropic’s numbers are moving the same direction
The OpenAI report landed just hours after a separate Bloomberg story on Anthropic, OpenAI’s closest rival in frontier AI. According to that report, Anthropic’s potential IPO valuation has slid from around $2 trillion in early October to somewhere between $1.2 trillion and $1.3 trillion now. That’s a steep haircut in about a month, for a company that posted the kind of revenue growth it highlighted in its own Q3 numbers and that keeps leaning on its self-reinforcing growth pitch to justify sky-high multiples to investors.
Put the two reports side by side and a pattern shows up fast: the biggest AI labs are still raising historic amounts of money, but the people writing the checks are negotiating a lot harder than they were a few months ago. Nobody is walking away from the table. They’re just asking tougher questions about the number on the term sheet.
The spending data behind the sticker shock
A separate report out this week, based on Ramp’s AI Index, helps explain why. Ramp tracks what companies actually spend on AI tokens through its corporate cards, and the growth curve has gone flat. Token spend grew 42% month over month in July. Across August and September combined, it grew just 1.5%. It picked back up slightly in October, up 8.9% from late September to late October, but nowhere near the pace from earlier in the year. Ara Kharazian, Ramp’s lead economist, pointed to the slowdown as a sign that enterprise AI adoption is maturing past its initial burst.
Part of the flattening is a pricing story, not just a demand story. Anthropic cut prices this year in a move the company said slashed its own revenue growth by about $600 million, according to a company filing. OpenAI halved API prices for its GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna models back in September. Cheaper tokens mean companies can do more AI work for the same spend, which flatters usage numbers while softening the revenue line investors actually care about. Even among Ramp’s heaviest AI users, the top 1% of firms by spend, usage dipped slightly in August and September, hovering just under $10,000 per employee per month. The median company, by contrast, spends somewhere between $12 and $15 per employee per month, which is a reminder of how concentrated AI’s biggest bills still are among a small group of power users.
What’s actually spooking the money
The timing lines up with a rough stretch for the broader AI financing story. Both reports broke in the same news cycle as a Democratic sweep in the US midterms and growing public backlash over data center construction, both of which have made Wall Street nervous about how friendly the next few years of AI infrastructure policy will actually be. Reuters has separately reported that OpenAI considers itself ready for an IPO in 2027, which means both of the industry’s top two labs are now walking into public or quasi-public fundraising with investors suddenly a lot less willing to take valuation on faith.
None of that means the AI boom is over. It means the free-money phase of it might be. A year ago, a frontier lab floating a trillion-dollar valuation got funded on vibes and a waitlist. Now even OpenAI, the company that popularized the whole category, is taking longer to close a round and landing below what it originally asked for, while Anthropic’s bankers are reportedly having to argue down a $2 trillion number before the company has even filed to go public.
The bottom line
This is the first time in a while that both OpenAI and Anthropic have taken a visible haircut on valuation expectations in the same week, and that’s a bigger tell than either headline number alone. Revenue at both companies is still climbing, and enterprise token usage, while flatter than it was, hasn’t reversed. The willingness of investors to pay almost anything for a seat at the table is what’s running into resistance. Worth watching whether OpenAI’s round actually closes anywhere near $20 billion, or whether it quietly shrinks further before anyone signs. Either way, the era of trillion-dollar AI valuations getting rubber-stamped without a fight looks like it just ended.
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