Anthropic has become the most contentious company in Silicon Valley, somewhere between an incomplete funding round and a subtly aggressive courtship by venture capitalists. The figure that is being discussed is $800 billion. Anthropic did not agree to that valuation. It is the amount that investors are purportedly prepared to pay on their own initiative in order to gain access. more than twice the company’s February valuation. Additionally, the company is currently largely declining.
For a startup, this is an unusual stance. When presented with such an offer, the majority of founders would not hesitate to accept it. However, Anthropic appears to be taking the unusual step of waiting for a public listing later this year, allowing the demand to grow. People who are close to the company believe that the IPO is now a matter of when rather than whether. The atmosphere in the company’s San Francisco offices, where engineers work long hours honing Claude’s coding skills, is said to be somewhere between disciplined and a little skeptical.
The frenzy is driven by large numbers. From approximately $9 billion at the end of the previous year, Anthropic’s run-rate revenue has increased to about $30 billion. Even cautious investors lose their cool when they see a jump like that in less than a year. The company now has over 1,000 business clients who spend over $1 million a year. In less than two months, that number has doubled. These are not soft numbers, regardless of your opinion on AI valuations.
The argument is still quite loud. On the one hand, investors such as Theory Ventures’ Tomasz Tunguz recently referred to Anthropic’s new model, Mythos, as a “huge deal.” However, some seasoned fund managers are openly questioning whether the AI industry as a whole has detached itself from any kind of conventional valuation reasoning. Last month, OpenAI closed at $852 billion. Anthropic is being pushed in the direction of $800 billion. This application of math feels less like arithmetic and more like belief.
The resemblance to past tech moments is difficult to ignore. Both the true believers and the skeptics of the dot-com era proved to be partially correct. Before becoming what it is today, Tesla had to deal with similar skepticism for years. The technology may not be familiar, but the pattern is. The speed is what’s truly novel. A company that was established in 2021 is currently being discussed alongside oil majors and conglomerates that date back a century. Even those who are optimistic should take note of that.
The noise has only increased since the Mythos model was revealed earlier this month. According to Anthropic, the model is so potent that there are cybersecurity risks associated with making it public. For investors, such a warning from the company that created the product falls somewhere between cautionary and subtly exciting. It can probably perform a great deal of legitimate work if it can identify and take advantage of flaws at that level. It is another matter entirely whether that warrants an 800 billion dollar price tag.
It’s really unclear what will happen next. Anthropic may decide to go straight toward a public offering, delay the timeline, or accept a new round. There are risks associated with every path. The public markets have historically been less forgiving, so an IPO would test whether they share the private market’s zeal. Observing all of this from the outside, there is a sense that the coming months will reveal something significant about the true state of AI investing. Not only Anthropic. about everything.
