# Priced for a Monopoly, Selling a Commodity - The VC Read - Week of September 24, 2026 > The VC Read for the week of September 17 to 24, 2026. Podcast synthesis on Anthropic and OpenAI seeking monopoly valuations at 20 to 30 times revenue just as venture investors bet the token business is commoditizing, open-weight models taking most of AI traffic, Brad Gerstner's no-bubble rebuttal, Daniel Dines splitting the difference on buying the labs but not their tokens, and Anthropic's record IPO slipping toward November. ## The VC Read ### Week of September 24, 2026: Priced for a Monopoly, Selling a Commodity --- *The frontier AI labs want the public to pay 20-to-30 times revenue for a slice, right as their smartest customers quietly route around them, and the biggest IPO in history keeps slipping. The week of September 17-24, 2026.* A quick note on sourcing before we start. This was actually a rich week for venture-macro talk, after a run of thin ones. The freshest material clusters September 17-23 and comes mostly from the shows we lean on: This Week in Startups, 20VC, All-In, Big Technology, Pivot and one terrific niche interview from Origins. A couple of the sharpest facts come from a September 14 CNBC segment, which I've date-stamped so you can weigh it accordingly (the podcast feeds tend to run about a week behind). Two regulars went dark: BG2 (Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley) published nothing in the window, and The Meb Faber Show had nothing on-topic. ## The Big Debate The most valuable companies ever created are trying to sell you a piece, just as the smart money bets the thing they sell is turning into a commodity. Here is the strange picture this week painted. Anthropic and OpenAI, the two most valuable private companies on earth, are both trying to raise enormous sums from public or near-public investors, Anthropic aiming at a stock-market debut valuing it around $2 trillion, OpenAI floating a new private round at $1.5 trillion. Both are asking to be priced at roughly 20 to 30 times their annual revenue. And in the same seven days, some of the most experienced venture investors in the business sat on podcasts and said, out loud, that they would rather own almost anything else. That is the debate worth having this week: not "is AI a bubble" (we've worn that one out), but a sharper, more useful question, if you had to put real money to work, would you buy the frontier model companies at these prices, or would you bet on the cheap, open, commoditizing layer that is eating their lunch? The two camps are unusually far apart. ### The Bearish Case: It's a Race to the Bottom, and You Don't Want to Own the Racers The most vivid version came from a This Week in Startups roundtable bluntly titled "VCs Would Bet on Open-Source AI Over OpenAI and Anthropic" (This Week in Startups, "VCs Would Bet on Open-Source AI Over OpenAI and Anthropic," September 23). Host Jason Calacanis put a thought experiment to the panel: with your own money, would you buy a $2 trillion frontier model company like Anthropic at 20-to-30 times revenue, or just index the infrastructure underneath it, NVIDIA, the cloud providers, the open-source layer? One by one, the investors picked against the labs. "I go all open source," said Jenny, one of the GPs on the panel. "There's no rules around open source... consumers don't care. They just care about price and quality. And they're so close to catching up... Most applications don't need the latest and greatest." Calacanis agreed. Another panelist said he'd go "100% into the hardware stack," adding that his own portfolio companies are abandoning the frontier labs: "My startups are all going open source... I talked to 11 Labs. I talked to Lovable... Figma as well. They don't trust the frontier models. They think they're going to be competitors." The reasoning underneath the vote is about economics, not vibes. Jeff Clavier of Uncork Capital laid out why selling access to AI models (what the industry calls "selling tokens," you pay per chunk of text the model reads or writes) is a brutal business: "It's a race to the bottom. That's sort of the issue. So you have all the funding that they raise that essentially is sponsoring all this usage... they basically predicate their future to their ability to raise the next round so that they can continue sustaining the fact that they're losing a bunch of money as soon as someone uses their product." His worry isn't abstract: "The cash needs that they have are such that you wonder if they're going to be able to raise more capital." And the market share is already gone. The panel cited a routing company, one of the middlemen that decides which AI model each request gets sent to, that tracks about 80% of token traffic and finds open-weight models (free-to-download models like Meta's, or China's DeepSeek and Kimi) now account for 78% of usage, versus 21% for the closed, proprietary models that Anthropic and OpenAI sell. That's the crux: the buyers have already voted with their traffic. As one panelist put it, when you get down past the giants, "these valuations are 20 to 30 times top line revenue... They won't be a very good bargain for public market investors." The clincher this week was a price war the labs started themselves. As the panel noted, OpenAI and Anthropic shipped new models hours apart, and both cut prices hard at the same time. OpenAI's new "Sol" and "Luna" models came in roughly 50% cheaper (Sol at $2 per million tokens); Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 costs about 40% less to run than the prior version. "Neither a big capability jump," the panel observed, "but both of these are massive price cuts." When the two supposed monopolists are undercutting each other on the same afternoon, that is not what pricing power looks like. ### The Bullish Case: The Largest Earnings Super-Cycle in History, and the Revenue Is Real The strongest rebuttal came from Brad Gerstner of Altimeter, who used a guest slot on All-In to argue there is no bubble at all (All-In, "Brad Gerstner: No AI Bubble, Semis Eat the Nasdaq & AI's Take Off Problem," September 17). His core point: this rally is being paid for by profits, not hope. NVIDIA, he noted, trades at about 14 times next year's earnings, below its historical average, not above it. "This is not about multiple expansion. This is an earnings-driven market expansion." Corporate earnings are up 26%, driven heavily by AI infrastructure, while the market's valuation multiples have actually fallen this year. Gerstner's case rests on demand that he says is simply unprecedented. Anthropic's revenue, he recounted, went from $2 billion in January to $4 billion in February to $11 billion in March as customers figured out how much it was actually making, "revenues that have never happened before in the history of capitalism." He framed the single most important number in the market as the labs' monthly revenue: the top three (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX) are at roughly a $100 billion combined run rate, and he thinks they need to reach about $180 billion by year-end "just to keep the AI trade intact." On the fear that there isn't enough demand to justify the trillion-dollar-plus building spree, he was dismissive: knowledge work is "the largest TAM in the history of the world," and "you only have to get to about 4% of that... or $1.2 trillion in order to pay for the CapEx." His evidence that it's landing: coding-tool users up 40x in eight months, median enterprise AI spend up 17x in 18 months, and companies like Uber and Snowflake openly planning to grow 20-30% without growing headcount, pure margin expansion. Notably, even Gerstner conceded the open-source problem is the live risk. He said the market "moved sideways" in recent months precisely because of two worries: that Anthropic's run rate was $65 billion rather than the $75 billion people hoped, and "we had some concerns about open source. Is open source catching up?" His answer is to stay "medium," invested but flexible, and watch those monthly revenue prints. If they come in near $8 billion a month, "it's takeoff... I think we are going to see an IPO this year." His one explicit warning was about leverage, a clear nod to the hedge-fund blowup earlier this summer: "Don't YOLO... Don't go 4X like our friend up north who gave all his money to Citadel." ### The Nuanced Middle: Buy the Companies, Sell the Token Business Daniel Dines, the founder of UiPath, offered the most interesting split-the-difference view (20VC, "Why AI Cannot Replace Humans in Enterprise... with Daniel Dines, UiPath," September 21). He is bullish on the labs as businesses, he bet on Anthropic when it was worth $60 billion and says he wouldn't sell even at $2 trillion, but he thinks the token-selling economics are exactly as fragile as the bears say. His prediction for enterprise work: "90% of the flow will go to very cost-efficient models. I don't think you need frontier-level quality of models for most operational work." His deeper thesis is that "models are interchangeable... the workflow, the map of work and the workflows around the map of work is where the real value is," which is why he thinks most large companies will run their own open-source models as a backup and refuse to be locked in. He'd buy Fireworks (an open-model infrastructure company) at $15 billion before he'd pay $2 trillion for a lab he can't yet see the numbers for: "If I buy a 2 trillion, I need to have a path to 5. And right now, I need to see the real numbers." Dines also delivered the week's most quietly damning explanation of why the labs are even doing this. They aren't going public out of strength, he argued, they're doing it because they've run out of other options: "Why is Anthropic trying to do an IPO? ... They just have to, because they have exhausted all private funding that exists. They are literally hitting the tap-out button on the supply of private capital." ### The Swing Factor: The Numbers Nobody Has Seen Yet, and the Ones Already Leaking The whole debate resolves on two sets of figures. First, the ones still hidden: Anthropic's actual financials, which its long-awaited S-1 (the detailed prospectus a company must publish before a US listing) may reveal "as soon as a couple weeks from now," per Pivot (September 22). Bulls and bears agree that document is the referee. Second, the numbers already dribbling out, and they lean bearish. Citing a Ramp report titled "Cracks in the AI Thesis," the Big Technology hosts noted the blended price of a million tokens has fallen 41% this year, to $0.68 from a March peak of $1.15; that frontier models' share of usage has dropped from 53% to 45% in a month as routing services push traffic to cheaper options; and, most worrying, that per-employee AI spending among the top 1% of corporate customers (who make up roughly 80% of the labs' revenue) fell 9.7% last month (Big Technology, "AI Doom Backlash Arrives, Anthropic & OpenAI IPO Outlook, Frontier Business Momentum Slows," September 19). If the S-1 confirms that the biggest customers are pulling back while prices collapse, the $2 trillion number becomes very hard to defend. ## Signals **Why the record IPO keeps slipping, and whether "safety" is the real reason.** Anthropic pushed its listing from October to November, and several hosts now doubt it happens this year at all (Pivot, "Trump's Press Crackdown, Paramount Settles, and Anthropic's $2 Trillion IPO," September 22). CNBC's Leslie Picker reported that Anthropic has confidentially filed and aimed to go public "as soon as next month," but that CEO Dario Amodei's viral 4,000-word essay warning about AI's dangers, plus a wave of follow-up interviews, may trip the SEC's "quiet period" rules that limit what a company can say before an IPO (Squawk Pod, "Calls for an AI Slowdown 9/14/26," September 14). For comparison, SpaceX went from confidential filing to public prospectus in seven weeks; Anthropic is well past that. Two readings are circulating. The cynical one, from Scott Galloway: "A lot of the stock people feel like they're calling for these slowdowns in order to catch up... it's all a feint." The less cynical one, from Calacanis on 20VC (September 17): Amodei's doom essay was "just a risk factor in an S-1 done live... he's getting ahead of a risk factor so that when the $2 trillion IPO happens, it's a non-issue." Either way, Galloway captured the awkwardness of pitching the largest IPO in history while your CEO warns AI might kill everyone: "going public in the midst of insecurity about a mass extinction event." **OpenAI floats $1.5 trillion, and it looks like a trial balloon.** OpenAI is reportedly weighing a new private round at $1.5 trillion, roughly double its last $730 billion mark, on more than $40 billion of annualized revenue (Big Technology, September 19). The Big Technology hosts read the leak's careful hedging ("no decisions had been made and plans may change") as a company-planted trial balloon aimed at sovereign wealth funds, a sign, they argued, that "they're not seeing the interest in the funding round that they want." One detail did the FOMO work: investors reportedly approached at $1.2 trillion, but OpenAI wants $1.5 trillion, dangling an instant 25% markup to anyone who gets in at the lower number. **Death comes for SaaS-land, wearing a bending spoon.** Miro, the online-whiteboard darling valued at $17.5 billion in 2021, sold to Italian acquirer Bending Spoons for $1.35 billion, a fall of more than 90% (20VC, "Why 'Pacing the Frontier' is BS | Miro Sells for $1.35BN...," September 17). Rory O'Driscoll of Scale called it "the largest, utterly stale valuation from that period... a productivity tool in a world that just doesn't work that way," and cited a Sequoia partner's grim cartoon of death knocking on Evernote's door, then Airtable's, now Miro's. But he added the late-stage investor's consolation: because their money sits at the front of the line in a sale, "if your losers give you a 1x, then you'll die rich." (Mistral, separately, raised 3 billion euros, the buildout money keeps flowing to the infrastructure layer even as the 2021 app crop gets cleaned up.) **The new "decacorn" is a $25 billion exit, and it's warping seed bets.** On the same 20VC episode, the panel chewed over Instinct, a consumer personal-AI app reportedly raising $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation before it has really shipped. Calacanis worried it becomes "the next poolside," a product subsidized at $5-10 per user by venture money that can't survive once it has to actually charge. But the counter, relayed via an investor who just joined Menlo Ventures, is a whole new model: target the roughly 100 companies likely to exit above $25 billion. There are about 81 tech companies worth $25 billion or more today, up from 23 a decade ago; if that keeps climbing, paying up for elite teams starts to pencil. Meta, meanwhile, launched its own personal-AI app, Muse, a reminder that the giants are building the very consumer apps VCs hoped to fund. **Retail gets a side door into the labs.** The clearest sign that private-market mania has gone mainstream came from Robinhood's Sarah Pinto (Origins, "Robinhood's Sarah Pinto: Bringing Private Markets to the Public," September 21). Only 10-12% of Americans are even allowed to invest in private companies, she noted, so ordinary people "can only watch companies like Anthropic or OpenAI emerge from the sidelines." Robinhood's answer: RV1, a $700 million exchange-traded fund (2% fee, no carry, no minimum, open to everyone) holding stakes in 14 late-stage names including Databricks, OpenAI, Stripe, SpaceX and Ramp, most of the money raised from retail. A second fund, RV2, uses a different structure to buy roughly 150 Y Combinator seed-stage startups a year. The pitch is democratization and real disclosure; the risk, unspoken, is that retail is being handed the door just as the professionals are voting to leave the building. **The frontier's own numbers are the tell.** Beyond the Ramp data above, the pattern to watch is concentration: the labs' revenue depends on a handful of giant customers (the top 1% is ~80% of spend), and there are open questions about whether big buyers like Meta and Google are quietly pulling that usage in-house. In a business already running a price war, losing even a few whale customers is the difference between the bull's takeoff and the bear's race to the bottom. ## Quote of the Week > "It's not a company going public, it's a country's GDP going public." Scott Galloway, on Anthropic's proposed $2 trillion valuation (Pivot, September 22). Runner-up, for the line that explains why the IPOs are coming at all: > "They just have to, because they have exhausted all private funding that exists. They are literally hitting the tap-out button on the supply of private capital." Daniel Dines, UiPath (20VC, September 21). --- ## Get the full transcripts on Matterfact This briefing was produced with Matterfact, which indexes the complete, full-text transcripts of 120M+ podcast episodes alongside SEC filings, earnings calls, and financial datasets. 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