OpenAI or Anthropic Will Exceed $10 Trillion Valuation Within Five Years
Brendan Foody · Mercor CEO: Why Application Layer Companies Have No Moat & The Cost of Hiring AI Researchers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jun 1, 2026 · at 51:10
Brendan Foody is the founder and CEO of Mercor, a $10B AI data provider company. He forecasts long-term market valuations for leading frontier AI labs.
0:00 / 0:33exact quote · 33.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I could definitely see one of them being a 10 trillion dollar company maybe even significantly higher. It feels Like the opportunity associated with being the frontier model is so large that it will just like eat up so much of the other demand within the economy, because that also means that when you have the frontier model, you can use that as a teacher model, distill your own models to have the best small models, et cetera. So I would guess at least one of them is worth more than 10 trillion dollars.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Brendan Foody
Mercor scaled from $1M to $500M run rate in 17 months
“We scaled the business from one to five hundred million in the last 17 months, which is the fastest revenue growth of all time. One month faster than Cursor's time.”
Reinforcement learning environments will subsume the entire economy
“RL environments will subsume the entire economy, because it doesn't make sense that humans would be doing monotonous, redundant work.”
Scale AI lost its focus on product and quality
“But in some ways, scale lost the focus on product on scaling quality. And that was one of the largest challenges of the business.”
Tech companies will employ more software engineers in five years, not fewer
“I think more. And the reason is that engineering is such an elastic role, right? Where if we could build a hundred times more software or say we make engineers 10 times more efficient, We would probably build a hundred times more software, right? And so far as…”