Sam Altman at BlackRock Infrastructure Summit Held In Washington, DC

(Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

fatcatgpt

OpenAI is now valued at $852 billion — that’s about 5 Disneys

The company just closed out the biggest funding round in Silicon Valley history, raising $122 billion.

4/1/26 6:22AM

Imagine what it could have been worth if it hadn’t shut down Sora!

OpenAI, the behemoth behind ChatGPT and still very much the cash-burning mass at the center of the AI universe, just closed out the biggest funding round in Silicon Valley history, raising a total of $122 billion and taking its current valuation to a genuinely staggering $852 billion.

The vast majority of the latest round comes from just three companies: Nvidia and SoftBank stumped up $30 billion apiece, while Amazon chipped in (a very much conditional) $50 billion — with the remainder made up of smaller sums from Andreessen Horowitz, MGX, and a host of other investors, per Bloomberg reporting.

Sam Altman’s company is now expected to IPO before the end of the year, according to reports, and the latest raise puts it well ahead of competitor Anthropic, which makes the Claude suite of products and raised a somewhat paltry by comparison $30 billion last month at a $380 billion valuation.

With its new jaw-dropping valuation, OpenAI is also now worth a great deal more than some of the biggest names in US business history.

OpenAI 2026 valuation chart — Sherwood News

All told, the AI giant is now valued at roughly the same as McDonald’s ($222 billion), Disney ($171 billion), Boeing ($156 billion), Uber ($148 billion), Comcast ($105 billion), and Ford ($46 billion)... combined.

Considering the insane deals the company has struck as of late, it shouldn’t find it too difficult to part ways with its newly raised capital.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5