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

Neywiny

Minor investors. Semi-major. Everybody

yogthos

So is anyone with even a minimally functioning brain. Anthropic has no viable business model because models are generic commodity. There's no lockin that Anthropic has because it's trivial for people to switch to a different provider. And whatever improvements Anthropic makes are quickly matched by other models within months. So, it's a race to the bottom because they have to keep spending more and more money on training the models just to keep ahead of the competition, while prices are driven down by the availability of open models. Chinese companies understand this, and that's why they give their models away in the open. The real money is going to be in integrations and custom services built on top of the models. The models themselves aren't what's valuable.

anxman

A $1T valuation would imply OpenAI’s most recent round is already under water. Everyone has to get capital efficient now — and fast!

dmitrygr

So is anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together. What does Anthropic have that MyNewAi Co doesn't? Open models are not bad, and anyone can pay google for GPU rent.

bmurray7jhu

Gift link https://www.wsj.com/finance/major-investors-are-skeptical-an...

htrp

They delaying the ipo?

sick_of_slop

Anthropic keeps nerfing their models to appease entrenched corporate overlords and it takes 5 seconds to switch to Deepseek or GLM. Can’t even use Claude to protect yourself against a cyber attack from a Chinese model based attacker for “safety”. What a joke. Nerfed, proprietary models have have no future and these trillion dollar valuations are laughable.

beloch

Here's why I'm skeptical: It may only be a short-term circumstance that you need a data centre to run AI for lucrative applications. Thirty years ago you needed a mainframe to beat Kaspersky at chess. Algorithm's got better, and now you can beat the mainframe that beat Kaspersky with a bot running on a desktop Pentium of the day[1]. You could still, today, devote a full hyperscale data centre to create a chess bot to beat all other chess bots, but nobody is doing that because there's no money in it. The frontier is continually pushed outwards. At it's outer edge you need mainframes and data-centres. Once it pushes past, you don't. There wasn't a lot of money in Chess or protein folding, despite the later having huge potential for public benefit. There is a lot of money in coding and middle management, and that's what currently has tech-bros in a frenzy. However, there's no guarantee that what the frontier moves onto next will be lucrative. It might be more chess and protein folding. If, as Algorithm's and hardware improve, coding moves to local models (Sam Altman's nightmare) and nothing lucrative immediately replaces that, what are these companies going do do with their massive data-centres? The scale of investment we're seeing these companies commit only makes sense if they have multiple decades to reap the returns. They may well not have that much time. _____________________ [1] https://hackaday.com/2026/11/05/pitting-a-modern-chess-engin...

tristanj

I would not be surprised at all if the US government ends up taking a 10% stake in each of OpenAI and Anthropic.

labrador

What happens if Anthropic becomes a specialized high intelligence company because they can't afford the build out. Claude would be like an expensive Bloomberg Terminal or an investment letter that offers valuable and expensive intelligence. I think about this because I pay $100/mo for Fable. How much more would I be willing to pay? I'm not sure yet. It depends on how smart the AI in the future becomes.

imglorp

Even if it's worth $1.5T, how much can it grow from there? The shareholders will demand growth and then what?

woeirua

I don't think people realize just how screwed Anthropic is if their revenue doesn't grow at a crazy rate. They can be incredibly successful and still go bankrupt because of how much compute they are committed to buy. Everything has to go right, and if it doesn't then they go out of business.

Octoth0rpe

What always confuses me about Anthropic is them insisting that they need more compute. This feels wrong in several ways: a) they're certainly not addressing their customers like they're compute-limited. One must ask, what would that look like? For one, I think it'd look like a wait list to sign up. It'd look like prices going _higher_, and not lower b) IIUC, their revenues don't cover their _current_ compute costs. So, let's pretend coreweave magics up a new dc and hands it over to anthropic, which means presumably anthropic needs to start paying for it. How does that affect anthropic's revenue? AFAICT, it just adds costs, it doesn't make their revenue go up. The only interpretation I can find is if Anthropic is _convinced_ that they need to train faster/harder, and that doing so would somehow significantly shift their TAM or costs, for example by coming up with a model that was simply 10+ years ahead of anyone else that costs the same as opus 5.5 to run, and they instantly nab the entirety of openai's market share. Seems pretty unlikely.