Has the industry trend changed? OpenAI voted second among “startups most likely to fail”

At the Cerebral Valley Summit in San Francisco, more than 300 artificial intelligence (AI) founders and investors ranked Perplexity as the startup most likely to fail, and star AI company OpenAI ranked second.

Perplexity is an AI search engine founded in 2022 by former OpenAI researcher Aravind Srinivas and others to improve the efficiency of assistant use. It is currently valued at approximately US$20 billion, and its shareholders include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Databricks, Samsung, etc.

It is obvious thatThe anonymous survey results show a significant change in sentiment in Silicon Valley.

When asked which private technology companies they would invest in, attendees chose Anthropic over OpenAI, which has been competing fiercely in the large model space, although there is consensus that OpenAI will lead next year's LMArena rankings - one of the global AI model ranking and evaluation systems.

In fact, OpenAI's valuation jumped from US$14 billion to nearly US$500 billion in a short period of time. The level of enthusiasm from the outside world sounded the alarm to analysts, making people compare it to the Internet bubble era.

The above survey results also show that other startups on the list include Cursor, Figure, Harvey, Mercor, Mistral and Thinking Machines.

Anthropic K.O. OpenAI?

Perhaps more interestingly,Experts and investors are rapidly growing in favor of another startup, Anthropic, signaling a shift in how investors view the race toward artificial intelligence.

Relevant data shows that Anthropic's revenue increased from US$87 million in early 2024 to more than US$5 billion in August 2025. In September last year, the company completed a $13 billion Series F round at a valuation of $183 billion.

The company already holds 32% of the enterprise artificial intelligence market, surpassing OpenAI's 25% share, according to data compiled by Menlo Ventures.

Anthropic's developer tool Claude Code launched in May and has annual revenue of more than $500 million, according to the company. The number of enterprise customers has grown from less than 1,000 two years ago to more than 300,000 today.

Still, considering OpenAI's market dominance, it's still surprising that it ranks second in the "most likely to fail" category. But financial concerns may explain the pessimism. OpenAI expects revenue this year of $13 billion and losses of $9 billion. Operating losses are expected to reach $74 billion by 2028.

Overall, the company seems to be facing a huge problem: 95% of ChatGPT’s 800 million users don’t pay for the service. OpenAI, on the other hand, has pledged to invest more than $1 trillion over the next decade, mainly in computing infrastructure.

Meanwhile, financial documents show Anthropic expects to break even in 2028, while OpenAI won't hit that milestone until 2030.