Perplexity Faces Rising Doubts After AI Leaders Vote It “Most Likely To Fail”
The energy inside San Francisco’s Cerebral Valley Summit last week was upbeat, but the mood shifted when attendees were asked a blunt question: which highly valued AI company looked most at risk?
More than 300 founders and investors voted, and the answer was unexpectedly harsh.
Perplexity, the fast-growing search startup touted as a future challenger to Google, topped the list.
OpenAI came in second.
The informal poll, conducted anonymously by journalist Alex Heath, suggested something that Silicon Valley rarely admits publicly — enthusiasm for the AI boom is real, but so is the anxiety beneath it.
Why Perplexity Became The Top Worry For Investors
Perplexity’s rise has been one of the fastest in the AI sector.
Its valuation reportedly jumped from about $14 billion to nearly $50 billion within months, making it one of the most closely watched private firms in tech.
But insiders say the acceleration is precisely what unsettles them.
The company has pitched itself as the next major search engine, backed by prominent investors and constant product expansion.
Yet its reputation has been clouded by a series of legal challenges and reports of questionable scraping practices.
Amazon sued the company in November, accusing its Comet browser of making purchases on behalf of users.
Reddit filed a lawsuit in October over alleged mass scraping of posts.
Japanese newspapers Yomiuri Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei have filed copyright infringement claims, and the BBC has threatened similar action.
Even Cloudflare’s CEO compared the company’s scraping habits to those of “North Korean hackers,” after multiple reports claimed Perplexity ignored standard robots.txt protocols.
A company spokesman tried to brush off the summit results with humour, calling it a “judgmental valley conference”.
But the vote revealed something deeper: a widening divide between Perplexity’s public hype and private confidence among the people building the AI sector.
Are Investors Shifting Towards Anthropic?
While Perplexity attracted the most scepticism, the poll also hinted at another shift.
Asked which private AI company they would invest in today, attendees chose Anthropic over OpenAI — despite expecting OpenAI to lead next year’s LMArena ranking of the world’s strongest AI models.
The preference reflects Anthropic’s rapid growth.
The company expanded its revenue from $87 million at the start of 2024 to more than $5 billion by August 2025, driven by enterprise clients.
It now holds an estimated 32% share of the enterprise AI market, ahead of OpenAI’s 25%, according to data from Menlo Ventures.
Its developer product, Claude Code, launched in May and already produces more than $500 million in annualised revenue.
Business customers climbed from fewer than 1,000 two years ago to over 300,000 today.
Anthropic closed a $13 billion Series F round in September, giving it a valuation of $183 billion.
In short, reliability and enterprise spending appear to outweigh star power in the current investor climate.
Why OpenAI Ended Up In Second Place
OpenAI’s appearance as the second-most-likely-to-fail startup surprised many at the conference.
The company remains the global face of the AI boom and expects $13 billion in revenue this year.
But its financials have created unease.
OpenAI is on track to post roughly $9 billion in losses this year.
Internal projections suggest operating losses could reach $74 billion by 2028.
The bigger problem, insiders say, is the imbalance between its user base and its paying customers.
ChatGPT draws 800 million users each month, but 95% do not pay.
The company’s decade-long plan involves spending more than $1 trillion on compute infrastructure — a scale that few investors believe can be sustained without massive long-term monetisation.
Anthropic, by comparison, expects to break even by 2028.
OpenAI does not expect to reach that point until the end of the decade.
Other companies mentioned in the failure poll included Cursor, Figure, Harvey, Mercor, Mistral and Thinking Machines.
Still, optimism in the hardware sector remains strong.
Attendees predicted Nvidia could reach a $6 trillion market cap by the end of 2026.
Is The AI Boom Already A Bubble?
Many speakers at the event acknowledged that the industry is in a bubble, though not necessarily an unhealthy one.
As one investor put it,
“We’re definitely in a bubble, but the real question is which companies will become generational, and which will vanish.”
Perplexity’s appearance at the top of the list may not signal imminent collapse.
Instead, it suggests a moment of reflection among people who have witnessed previous waves of tech exuberance.
The AI race is producing extraordinary companies, but the gap between story and sustainability is becoming harder to ignore.
A Market Full Of Momentum And Doubt At The Same Time
From Coinlive’s vantage point, the summit revealed a split reality: extraordinary innovation on one side, and growing discomfort on the other.
Investors no longer reward raw ambition; they reward resilience, business models, and proof that billions in valuation are anchored to something durable.
Perplexity’s rise, OpenAI’s burn rate and Anthropic’s enterprise surge all point to a market entering a new phase — one defined not by who moves fastest, but by who survives the cost of staying in the race.
The next chapter of AI may be less about breakthroughs and more about discipline, sustainability and the uncomfortable question every founder now faces: how much of the hype can their business actually support?
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