OpenAI is now valued at $1.25 trillion, The Verge reports, citing Bloomberg, after a new funding round added another $11 billion to its war chest. The figure would place the company among the most valuable in the world — territory otherwise occupied by trillion-dollar public tech giants.

The round lands at a pointed moment: rival Anthropic is nearing its own IPO, setting up a split-screen test of how AI labs get priced. OpenAI continues to raise privately at ever-larger numbers, while Anthropic is heading for the scrutiny of public markets — two very different answers to the same question of how to fund frontier-scale compute.

A $1.25 trillion private valuation is historically unusual on its face. Companies at that scale have traditionally been public for years, with the disclosure obligations that come with it. Whether OpenAI's number survives contact with an eventual listing — and how Anthropic's debut prices against it — will say a lot about where the AI capital cycle actually stands.