Anthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T

(bloomberg.com)

318 points | by dgellow 2 days ago ago

77 comments

  • UncleOxidant 2 days ago ago

    Sure, this is a small anecdotal datapoint, but since I've gotten Qwen3.8-Flash-Next running well on my Strix Halo box my Claude Pro subscription use has dropped off a cliff. I'm only at 18% of quota usage this week - this being Friday I would've been at 80% at least in the past. This is just an astonishingly good model that runs locally and quite well on my PC. I do not plan to renew my Claude Pro subscription when it comes up in a couple of months.

  • soundworlds 2 days ago ago

    I've been using the $32/month (AUD) subscription, but finally dipped into extra credits to get a task over the line yesterday after I hit my 5-hr limit.

    And my god, $15 of extra credits ended up giving me only 30 minutes of Claude Code before running out.

    The subscription prices can not be financially sustainable. There is no way that is remotely close to the actual cost of running.

  • int32_64 2 days ago ago

    Looking at the S-1 lockup schedule the IPO seems doomed. They need to bring in a ton of investment, and you will have massive unlocks right as the next congress is most active authoring anti-AI bills. Who's going to buy this?

  • lnkdinsuxs 2 days ago ago

    I'm not convinced that 2026 was peak of the AI hype cycle.

    Arguments are being made that, with the midterms over and 2028 just around the corner, a less sympathetic administration would create significant headwinds, adjusting the valuation of Anthropic and OpenAI down.

    What we don't know are what Anthropic and OpenAI have planned and in the works.

    A large population of extremely skilled and talented people are being laid off by their employers to make space for AI investments. It's likely a significant number of them will start their own business with AI.

    AI is also gaining a much wider audience and acceptance. It's likely over the next few years, AI demand will grow, not stagnate.

    That said, IPOs are usually liquidity events for LPs and for something really disruptive and unpredictable as AI, I won't be engaging in their IPOs. Only time will tell if this was a good decision, or bad.

  • wewewedxfgdf 2 days ago ago

    Can someone help me understand - I have tried local AI/LLMs.

    Lets set aside speed. The results are ALWAYS terrible compared to CLaude Code.

    Sure I only have a 12GB GPU - is that what it is? If I had a 32GB CPU would the experience be as amazing as Claude Code is?

    Why is my experience of local LLMs so average?

  • Bluestein 2 days ago ago

    I (all other issues aside) honestly think we have lost all sanity when the term "low" (in any fashion) can end up associated with 1.1 TRILLION.-

    There is a serious, malignant, dangerous disarray somewhere in our callibration of value, of worth, of what things are worth. Something, many things, are wrong here.-

  • gaal_dornick 15 hours ago ago

    This is not unexpected. Anthropic revenue growth is stalling. Ramp's AI index shows spend on Anthropic peaked on July 31. The spend in the last week of October is lower than last week of July -> https://ramp.com/data/ai-index?metric=token-spend&detail=mak...

    Token volume is increasing though -> https://ramp.com/data/ai-index?metric=token-volume&detail=ma...

    Companies are cutting down on AI cost (adding per person budgets, using smaller models). Anthropic has also been forced to reduce token prices due to competition.

  • thisisauserid 2 days ago ago

    And there are worries about the Democratic midterm election sweep causing tighter scrutiny of new data centers and forcing Anthropic to pay wholesale for chips, or worse.

  • davidguetta 2 days ago ago

    can someone explain to me the point of the 'initial valuation', considering ultimately the price will settle lated thorugh trading to perceived value anyway ?

  • pinkmuffinere 2 days ago ago

    Some benchmarks to compare:

    Apple: 5 T

    Google: 3.5 T

    Meta: 1.55 T

    Microsoft: 3.97 T

    Berkshire Hathaway: 1.2 T

    Eli Lilly: 1.28 T

    Tesla: 1.38 T

    Walmart: 1 T

    Spotify: 125 billion

  • mlmonkey 2 days ago ago

    Did they consider doing a Dutch auction, like Google did in its IPO[1]?

    [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/19/es-took-off-but-the-auction-...

  • prakhar897 2 days ago ago

    Damodaran placed a fair value of $1.47T minus discount for really bad corporate structure. So $1.3T looks exactly right.

    And its kind of circular way of reasoning. As the investors would've actually watched the video and included it in their calculations.

  • mark_l_watson a day ago ago

    I am retired and use index funds for my 401Ks. I hate the idea of Anthropic becoming part of mandatory purchases into retirement funds. I hope it doesn’t happen.

    That said, Anthropic is an interesting company. I mostly use local models like Qwen 3.8 Next Flash, but when I occasionally use Opus 5.5 for difficult I enjoy the experience.

  • ChrisArchitect 2 days ago ago

    Related:

    Major Investors Are Skeptical Anthropic IPO Can Achieve $1.5T Valuation

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386597

  • motbus3 a day ago ago

    My impression is that none of those systems seems to be efficient. We see time after time systems that solves most 80% of the case to be 90% cheaper. And the way it is, it seems to me that nor openai nor Anthropic can keep the current prices.

    Some say that if Anthropic keep delivering improvements and be the first it will make it but for that, you need to disregard all competition from other llm companies and from other competitor systems.

    And even though they have the smartest model ever, if someone offers something 90% of it for 90% cheaper it will be worth it.

    We already see plenty of companies reducing ai cost because they don't see enough roi

  • freecodeio 2 days ago ago

    I've been trying to generate some product videos with opus 5.5 and I use the API because I don't like subscriptions.

    I burned about $150 of tokens over a few hours of chatting, although opus 5.5 did generate some 10-30kb html files at a time, containing the "videos".

    I think subscriptions are extremely subsidized still and what happened yesterday was just a small dip of what's to come.

  • iamflimflam1 2 days ago ago

    The moat really is shallow to non-existent.

    Both Anthropic and OpenAI are trying to build more tooling to try and lock companies into their ecosystems.

    But I can’t help thinking that they are impacted by the very thing they have created.

    You can now build your own enterprise tooling using the very models that they have created.

  • notenchange 2 days ago ago

    1.1T is 27% less than what they are aiming at, and yet, it’s still absolutely mind boggling.

    People love to reign in AI companies these days (and part of it is warranted) but the triple digit annual increase in revenue at Anthropic and others (SpaceX being in that category as well) is something never seen before.

    Some people are being too quick (or too willing) to disregard the obvious immense economic impact of AI and company (and I’m not talking about the next-day-ai-crash-incoming economic impact).

  • NortySpock a day ago ago

    I think also the demand for software tokens is going to be bursty, and many things are going to be one-time software ports.

    - Nervous about Redis being written in C? Switch to Garnet.

    - Bun ported from Zig to Rust for $165,000 at API pricing -> https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust

    - Microsoft ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120,000 in API costs without blocking other development work -> https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/migrating-the-gi...

    - Someone made a "clean room port" of Total Annihilation in golang, looks like it started in August and is now the most convenient way to play Total Annihilation. https://github.com/nanolathe-gg/nanolathe

    - You only have to decompile / reverse engineer an existing game once and now you can have an agent occasionally add features.

    Once you do the port and have worked out the regression issues, assuming you are switching to a safer language with better guarantees, you are now off of the old codebase and don't have to pay the costs of the old codebase. It's just a one time burst of token usage.

    Costs of tokens will continue to fall as more hardware either becomes rentable (datacenter comes online) or moves into the used market, as workloads move onto users individual machine (because smaller models are becoming more capable and getting better inference engines and harnesses).

    You can also task an agent with researching for "list the top 5 performance improvements we might be able to make" and have it research overnight, then the next day start a fleet of agents iterating through the findings that seem the most workable . Once you gain the performance win, that's basically permanent.

    I think that token usage is a very elastic market, you can choose to spin up a fleet of agents or... you can stay human-in-the-loop, or you can type code yourself if you don't have a token budget.

    So, yeah, I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI are worth much when hot on their heels are open-weight models hosted by major cloud providers + Nvidia and cloud providers themselves building their own models.

  • andsoitis 2 days ago ago

    Inference is projected to continue to become increasingly commoditized so you need to wrap it in compelling and differentiated product people are willing to pay for.

    Training, people argue, continue to be very capital intensive so moat there. What I'm wondering, is anyone trying out ideas the lower the training cost materially? I'm not thinking distilling because that, by definition, would always be behind the frontier. Other ways?

  • matt3210 2 days ago ago

    Really though we all know how this will play out. Google, Amazon, Microsoft are going to buy out both labs and we will all be centralized again

  • 2 days ago ago
    [deleted]
  • breakyerself 2 days ago ago

    Still too high

  • Zsfe510asG 2 days ago ago
  • rvz 2 days ago ago

    Still overvalued.

  • pyrophane 2 days ago ago

    Anyone have a sense of what a valuation like that would mean for employees trying to cash out?

  • smckk 2 days ago ago

    Here is a video overview of Anthropic's IPO filing by a finance expert. [0] https://youtu.be/PfjsIfXms4o

  • xyst 2 days ago ago

    It’s going to drop further, probably well below $1T. Still a multibillion dollar valuation though imo.

    Their numbers are shit. They are brittle af. Any shift in political climate results in internal mayhem.

    Same with openai

  • DoesntMatter22 2 days ago ago

    SpaceX had insanely great timing. They came in and ate up a lot of the available capital at the most prime the they could.

    Antropic will be fine I think but open AI will probably have issues

  • davidguetta 2 days ago ago

    can someone explain to me the point of the 'initial valuation', considering ultimately the price will settle lated thorugh trading to perceived value anyway ?

  • pinkmuffinere 2 days ago ago

    Some benchmarks to compare against:

    Apple: 5 T

    Google: 3.5 T

    Meta: 1.55 T

    Microsoft: 3.97 T

    Berkshire Hathaway: 1.2 T

    Eli Lilly: 1.28 T

    Tesla: 1.38 T

    Walmart: 1 T

    Spotify: 125 billion

  • bluecalm 2 days ago ago

    I think people in this thread who claim local models are anywhere close to Claude are completely detached from reality. 200$ Ultra sub is the best value ever offered in history of subscriptions. I got 3 running and would pay at least 3x more for them before looking at alternatives. If your local models or some DeepSeek on cheap provider or whatever you install instead of Claude makes even 2-3 more mistakes per week you are already losing money assuming your time is worth average software dev salary.

    I don't think it's remotely close either - Claude is that good. The problem is that it's not how Anthropic plans to make money to justify 1.5T-2T valuation. That would require companies paying API prices on long term big contracts and that makes it a completely different value proposition.

  • xlayn 2 days ago ago

    Please explain to me why my "naive and maybe ignorant" understanding of this is wrong... The bigger the IPO price, the more they earn and the more probability is for you to loose money invested in it.

    So say Anthropic, or OpenAi, or smartGummyBearsAI go IPO and the price is insanely high... and then spirals down to be 10% of the real price... they earn a lot of money and the public loose a lot of money.

    IF smartGummyBearsAI goes 100% realistic price and you buy near the correct price, they earn their fair money and people get an investment.

    IF smartGummyBearsAI says that they have technology to use the same machine that makes gummy bears print gpus and they are priced 10,000x their actual price the society just transfers a lot of wealth to them and they scam the society.

    Why shouldn't we regulate and aim for the correct price?

    Remember 801k money is what we are talking about

  • slantaclaus a day ago ago

    A price to sales ratio of 16 isn’t terribly crazy

  • netless 2 days ago ago

    using claude code with pro subscription and deepseek api. claude is project manager and deepseek is developer. combo seems pretty effective and efficient.

  • option 2 days ago ago

    1T is not low for an IPO

  • paulpauper 2 days ago ago

    Polymarket put a valuation at around $1.7 trillion

  • naveen99 2 days ago ago

    anthropic futures on binance dropped again today. why don't they just do a direct listing and then atm share sales ?

  • jacquesm 2 days ago ago

    Low ???

  • cmiles8 2 days ago ago

    It keeps dropping. Was 2T, then 1.5T last week, now looking like they might be lucky to get 1T.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthropic delays the IPO in hopes this will all magically sort itself out but as every day passes it looks like they should have gone public this summer when things were still on the up.

    Realistically the company is worth in the hundreds of billions but if it goes below 1.1T or so existing investors will need to start booking losses and that will trigger a shitstorm of other issues downstream.

    This is all becoming a textbook case of folks know these assets aren’t worth what folks want them to be, but they can keep the game going so long as nobody actually marks the asset at its actual realistic valuation.

    So that’s the game underway now. How low can they go without blowing up the whole AI ecosystem. If the valuations here drop next the AI bonds and private loans start to fail en-mass and the whole thing that built up this house of cards starts falling apart in reverse. Get ready for a bumpy ride folks.

  • cmiles8 2 days ago ago

    I wouldn’t be surprised if they pull the plug on the IPO and go hide under a privately funded rock.

    The second one of these AI companies gets a fair valuation and folks start booking losses the whole AI house of cards will come crumbling down. The crazy thing is if they drop below around 1T some existing investors will be booking losses.

    A realistic valuation is likely in the hundreds of billions, which would be a total disaster and thus they’re going to do everything possible to avoid that.

  • badrequest 2 days ago ago

    literally what is the upside? They're supposedly worth as much as meta despite having nowhere near the customer base or years of work? How much more valuation do they have to trick people into giving them before investors get a return?

  • bananaquant 2 days ago ago

    It is strange that they have this problem. I thought they achieved superintelligence. Maybe they haven't prompted it right yet.

  • JesseTG 2 days ago ago

    Get your tickets to Layoffpalooza 2027 now!

  • cite_please 2 days ago ago

    The future is not local models because by the time you think of what to pipe through the LLM, the super intelligent AGI owned by Anthropic or OpenAI (but not both) would have already mapped it out, generated it and had it in production. You can, however, still pursue living as a hobby.

    Simple as. I hope this helps.

  • jamesbfb a day ago ago

    The Facebook valuation some 10 years ago was like… 300 million? I mean, I get it, but jeez, when I see headlines like this “as low as(!)”, I need to pinch myself.

  • tosti 2 days ago ago

       potential buyers are discussing about a $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion valuation range for the company, according to people familiar with the matter. Some are weighing a value as low as $1.1 trillion
    
    These people are from another planet.
  • ethin 2 days ago ago

    > Anthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T

    AS LOW AS?! This wording has to be intentional... Because I would use "as high as", myself.

  • thisisauserid 2 days ago ago

    And after they went way out of their way to state in their S-1 that they would never dream of valuing the company at $1 more than it was worth?

  • dorienh 2 days ago ago

    Compare to SpaceXSI, they lack missiles, datacenters, and a profitable internet business so... yeah.

  • 0x4e 2 days ago ago

    Gotta give it to OAI for waiting. They smelled it.

  • rajup 2 days ago ago

    As "low" as 1.1T. What a world we live in where 1.1T is considered "low"...

  • jgalt212 2 days ago ago

    Seems like a great argument for anchoring high in negotiations.

  • m4rtink 2 days ago ago

    Still at least $1.1T too high.

  • rahulyc 2 days ago ago

    People seem unnecessarily deluded here in a supposed hacker forum. If they are really created actual digital intelligence smarter than every human and figure it out how to control it, then 1T dollars means this is the most undervalued business in the entire world. Maybe by 100x or 1000x. You have billions of super genius slaves in data centers that do whatever you want, then if a single human developer can earn $100k/year pessimisticly let alone a super genius one. Multiply that by a billion and do the math at 80% gross margins

  • techblueberry 2 days ago ago

    But we're so close to RSI!

  • vb-8448 2 days ago ago

    wasn't 1.3 just a couple of hours ago and 1.5 yesterday?

  • ryzvonusef 2 days ago ago

    that's low enough Musky could just buy it out right, jeez.

  • up2isomorphism a day ago ago

    1.1T is still insanely high. There is absolutely no reason why I can not use any of the OK models as long as I have reasonable hardware ti give a ok token rate.

  • vlflp 2 days ago ago

    As high as $1.1T. Where is the supposed growth going to come from?

    Claude has been pushed by force and coercive marketing into most software organizations and many open source projects. In 2026 the companies buying the narrative were exuberant and told employees to tokenmaxx.

    This will stop in 2027 because companies will find out that nothing has improved. Nothing at all. They'll evaluate the expenditures.

    So the market is saturated and usage is going down. Anthropic should be valued at $200 billion at best.

  • syngrog66 2 days ago ago

    "as low as $1.1T"

    the absurdity

  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 2 days ago ago

    1793898170 | Michael Burry: Anthropic Is "Betting Its Existence on Optimism" | https://mrkt30.com/michael-burry-anthropic-s1-commitments-op... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50381531

    1793902395 | So, about that Anthropic IPO | https://www.ft.com/content/2fbd60ee-060a-4957-b9c5-3b5a0ce88... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50382331

    1793918987 | Michael Burry says Anthropic is 'betting its existence' on optimism | https://www.businessinsider.com/michael-burry-anthropic-ipo-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50385642

    1793923469 | Major Investors Are Skeptical Anthropic IPO Can Achieve $1.5T Valuation | https://www.wsj.com/finance/major-investors-are-skeptical-an... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386375

    1793923694 | Anthropic warns that it's close to RSI capability, a.k.a. self-building AI | https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/02/anthropic-warns-that-its-v... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386406

    1793924267 | Major Investors Are Skeptical Anthropic IPO Can Achieve $1.5T Valuation | https://www.wsj.com/finance/major-investors-are-skeptical-an... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386483

    1793925071 | Major Investors Are Skeptical Anthropic IPO Can Achieve $1.5T Valuation | https://www.wsj.com/finance/major-investors-are-skeptical-an... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386597

    1793934067 | About That Anthropic IPO | https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-5... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50387632

    1793965329 | Is Anthropic About to Delay the Biggest IPO? | https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/anthropic-about-delay-biggest-i... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50391165

  • HexnMarcusWolfe 2 days ago ago

    They made a typo, it's more like $11B

  • breakyerself 2 days ago ago

    It's not worth 500 billion

  • lousken 2 days ago ago

    What? Imho that is still way too much, I wouldn't go above 400B, considering if z.ai is about 128B

  • paxy 2 days ago ago

    Talk about terrible timing. Had their IPO been 2 weeks earlier they'd have hit $2T easy.

  • thefounder 2 days ago ago

    make it 100b

  • epsteingpt 2 days ago ago

    Imagine 'as low as' next to 1.1 Trillion Dollars.

  • stevefan1999 2 days ago ago

    Good drop. Should be less than a trillion amid current midterm fallout. The chances of more AI regulations are coming.

    Colossus 1 & Colossus 2 are located on Tennessee and Mississippi, and Anthropic rents both of them earlier this year.

    Now that Democrats are surely going after Trump and Elon Musk and the sidekicks, and both Tennessee and Mississippi turned blue as well, this directly impacts the way Anthropic to source cheap compute and data in the future due to uncertainty around the continuation of SpaceX data centers. And other data center buildouts are likely to be paused for things like power grid connection and environmental impacts and land purpose evaluation, the compute capacity constraints are likely going south, too.

    Worse, the proposals around superintelligence is exactly what Anthropic is looking for: slow the fuck down. Now they got the killshot they long desired for, it obviously makes a dent in the capability and capacity of their AI, hence a drop in valuation. I think $800-900B is somewhere I would say okay, and $600-700B is really where it is fair, considering the long term outlook for Anthropic is looming with a greater AI massacre caused by political factors.

  • ath3nd 2 days ago ago

    [dead]

  • napierzaza 2 days ago ago

    [dead]

  • sick_of_slop 2 days ago ago

    [dead]

  • 999900000999 2 days ago ago

    I don't see how Anthro is worth 15x( Gemini estimates based off WSJ source )as much as Deepseek( 76 billion) .

    If anything is going to pull the rug out, it's going to be a model from Deepseek or another Chinese lab. I'll admit I'm very uncomfortable with so much of our economy riding on AI hype.

    To be fair to China, if AI is really this revolutionary technology, they need to be able to have home grown peers.

    Every nation ( or bloc of nations) needs alternatives to American tech.

  • atleastoptimal 2 days ago ago

    Anthropic intends to rule humanity with its ASI. Perhaps this is the optimal outcome, as there are many problems AI could fix that it wouldn't be able to as efficiently without eliminating the human bottlenecks which caused those issues, but I fear the more financially powerful it gets, the fewer checks there will be on any misalignment.

  • dude250711 2 days ago ago

    Perhaps $50B would be a fair valuation to aim for?

    Imagine that - 50 (fifty) times more than an average unicorn start-up!

    Something they could be very proud of, and many if not all employees would become multi-hundred-thousandaires practically overnight!

  • MisterMunchkin 2 days ago ago

    A trillion in debt and no profit. It ain’t worth a trillion. It has no moat and no guarantee of future revenue. It doesn’t own anything.

    50b would be a fair valuation.

  • outside1234 2 days ago ago

    [flagged]