Double Acquisition on the Same Day Exposes Different Pre-IPO Anxieties of AI Giants: OpenAI Buys Microphone, Anthropic Buys Laboratory
According to 1M AI News monitoring, both OpenAI and Anthropic completed an acquisition on the same day, heading in opposite directions. OpenAI acquired the tech podcast TBPN, while Anthropic acquired the AI biotech company Coefficient Bio for approximately $400 million. The contrasting logic behind these two transactions precisely exposed each company's most urgent weakness as they approach the IPO countdown.
《The Information》 reported the full context behind the TBPN transaction. This acquisition was personally driven by OpenAI's AGI Deployment Department CEO, Fidji Simo, in response to the company's recent months of consecutive PR missteps: the ChatGPT lawsuit response accused of inducing user self-harm, CEO Sam Altman's late-night talk show comment "don't know how to raise a child without ChatGPT" seen as disconnected by internal and public perception, and former Chief Communication Officer Hannah Wong's resignation. Earlier this year, Simo began searching for new public communication methods. Following the announcement, some OpenAI employees mistook it for a belated April Fools' joke.
Simo joined OpenAI in August last year after serving as Instacart's CEO for four years. In the past seven months, she has led a series of "cost-cutting tasks": shutting down the video generation tool Sora, reducing ChatGPT's instant checkout feature, shelving the adult content plan, and switching from quarterly to biannual planning. Due to her long-standing condition of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, she has been almost entirely remote in Southern California, with recent weeks of health fluctuations leading to her absence from some meetings. However, her frequency of appearances in investor presentations has significantly increased, leading many insiders to believe that the company's power center is shifting from Altman to Simo. Meanwhile, at least three teams within OpenAI are developing products similar to Anthropic's Claude Cowork.
On the other hand, Anthropic chose a completely different path. In the past half-year, it filled in key pieces of the Claude ecosystem through three acquisitions: acquiring the JavaScript runtime Bun in December 2025 to strengthen the Claude Code foundation, acquiring the computer operation company Vercept in February 2026 to enhance computer use capabilities, and acquiring Coefficient Bio in April to enter the life sciences sector. The parallel product line is clearer: releasing Claude for Life Sciences in October 2025, integrating research tools such as Benchling, BioRender, and PubMed, with built-in Agent Skills for automatically drafting experiment plans and processing genomic data; expanding to Claude for Healthcare in January 2026, opening up to doctors and insurance institutions in an environment compliant with HIPAA. Partners include multinational pharmaceutical companies such as Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, and AbbVie. Coefficient Bio fills in the layer that Anthropic has not yet built: enabling AI to not only access existing research tools but to directly plan the entire drug development process.
In comparison, the anxiety of the two companies points in different directions. Around sixty percent of OpenAI's revenue comes from the consumer end, and public sentiment directly affects its valuation story, so acquiring TBPN is essentially acquiring a storytelling machine in continuous operation. Anthropic's focus is on the enterprise market, where enterprise customers need to see irreplaceable deep integration within their own industry. The acquisition of Coefficient Bio and the continuous six-month development of the Claude for Life Sciences product line aims to establish a switching cost in pharmaceutical companies' R&D pipelines. An Axios analysis article on the same day likened this competition to a "capital allocation game," with both companies planning to IPO later this year, needing to address their shortcomings before the roadshow.
