It's completely absurd. Company A is boasting that its IPO valuation will reach 30 trillion US dollars, a figure that is equivalent to the entire GDP of the United States.
That's absolutely absurd!
30 trillion US dollars. This is the figure Anthropic plans to include in its prospectus.
30,000,000,000,000 US dollars.
Just yesterday, The Wall Street Journal broke the news that the creator of Claude will inform investors that the potential revenue opportunities it faces exceed 30 trillion US dollars.
Anthropic confidentially submitted its IPO draft to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, and the public version will be released as early as the end of this month.
The full-year GDP of the United States is about 32.4 trillion US dollars. In other words, a company founded five years ago with less than 4,000 employees has set its revenue ceiling as large as the entire U.S. economy.
Three months ago, Elon Musk's SpaceX wrote down 28.5 trillion in its prospectus, calling it "the largest addressable market in human history". This record had not even been warmed up before it was overtaken.
Anthropic has drawn an extra 1.5 trillion US dollars more than SpaceX.
It is like two people competing for who has a bigger mouth: one says he can swallow the entire Sun, while the other says he can not only swallow the Sun, but also Mars.
The TAM ruler has been pulled apart
This figure is called TAM — total addressable market. In plain language, it means: assuming you have 100% monopoly over this business, what is the maximum amount of revenue you can generate in one year.
TAM is a standard configuration for tech companies going public, and it has always been the most unaccountable item in the prospectus.
Uber reported 6 trillion US dollars in 2019, calculated based on the mileage value of all private cars worldwide plus public transport services. WeWork reported 3 trillion in its ultimately aborted IPO. Both figures were widely ridiculed back then.
Now in the AI era, this ruler has been directly pulled apart.
There are 191 tech companies in the S&P 1500, with a combined total revenue of 2.4 trillion US dollars last year. The market Anthropic has mapped out is 12 times the sum of all of them.
Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, is known in the industry as the "Dean of Valuation". Before SpaceX's issuance, he told The Wall Street Journal that the TAM SpaceX saw in AI had "reached the end of the reasonable range and is still pushing outward".
He said that when the figure was still 28.5 trillion. If he saw the 30 trillion figure, he would probably drop his glasses on the spot.
The tech media Gizmodo made an even more unsparing comment: The conversation between companies and investors is inherently an art of painting the rosiest picture possible. A figure like 30 trillion is basically challenging others to call you out for bragging.
Here comes the question: how on earth was this figure calculated?
The answer is: all work that can be completed by AI models is included in the calculation.
Note that at this point, this is no longer estimating the market size for a certain industry.
It is putting a total price tag on all the work that human beings can hand over. Programming, writing, customer service, legal work, financial analysis, medical diagnosis... All work done by humans that AI could possibly take over is packaged, labeled with a price, and presented to Wall Street.
Anthropic, you shouldn't do this.
The reason why this figure is "inflated" is that no one knows the speed at which AI penetrates all walks of life, nor how much work it can eventually take over.
When you look at Anthropic's current business, the gap becomes obvious.
In the second quarter of this year, its revenue more than doubled to 11.6 billion US dollars, with a current annualized revenue run rate of about 47 billion US dollars. Reuters reported on August 15 that the company expects its 2028 revenue to be between 190 billion and 200 billion US dollars, and its IPO valuation is pinned on this set of forecasts.
Divide the most optimistic 200 billion by 30 trillion, and you get 0.67%.
The story Anthropic presents to investors thus becomes: this market is so huge that I only need to capture six thousandths of it to support a 2 trillion US dollar valuation.
This doesn't look like a business plan, it's more like a math problem. You see, as long as the denominator is large enough, I only need to take a tiny share to get by.
Anthropic's target valuation is 2 trillion US dollars, while its post-money valuation after completing the 65 billion US dollar financing in May this year was 965 billion US dollars. From the last round of private placement to the moment of listing, capital will double its valuation again in just a few months.
SpaceX's stock price is a ready reference. It rose for a period after listing, fell below 105 US dollars intraday in early August, and now has returned to around the 135 US dollar issue price.
A man with a net worth of 15.5 billion US dollars
Starts to worry that employees care too much about money
The 2 trillion US dollar IPO will make many of Anthropic's employees millionaires overnight.
SpaceX has already demonstrated this scenario.
Anthropic's scale this time will only be larger.
But while everyone is salivating over this figure, the company is using another number to screen people internally.
According to an exclusive report from Axios on August 24, Anthropic now directly asks candidates during the cultural interview session: If the company one day abandons its AI ambitions for safety reasons and the stock price falls to zero, what would you think?
One candidate posted his answer on the anonymous workplace community Blind, and his answer was very honest: "I said very honestly that I would not be happy if the stock fell to zero. I hope to build a sustainable business while doing the maximum amount of good and maintaining ethics."
According to this candidate, the interviewer did not seem satisfied with this answer.
The base salary for software engineer positions at Anthropic ranges from 320,000 to 405,000 US dollars.
This is the most contradictory point of this company.
Dario Amodei's personal net worth is about 15.5 billion US dollars — this figure doubled after the financing round in May.
In January this year, he published a 20,000-word long article titled "The Adolescence of Technology", in which he wrote a sentence: What we really need to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will tear society apart. He also specifically criticized those tech rich people who think philanthropy is doomed to be a scam, saying "sadly, many wealthy people... have recently adopted a cynical nihilistic attitude".
He, together with six other co-founders including his sister Daniela, promised to donate 80% of their respective wealth. Calculated at the current valuation, this amount exceeds 86 billion US dollars.
At the same time, he is worried that new employees do not join for the mission, but for sudden wealth.
Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation, and its articles of association stipulate that it cannot only maximize profits for shareholders.
The company's value statement reads: In the final analysis, the mission is the reason why all of us are here.
This sentence used to be written on the recruitment page, and no one needed to pay a price for it. Now it is going to be written into the prospectus, right next to the 30 trillion US dollar figure.
After listing, it will face quarterly earnings calls, face analysts asking about gross margins, and face shareholders demanding returns.
A public benefit company that claims mission comes before profits is leveraging the largest TAM in human history to pry open one of the largest IPOs in human history.
It is a little bit ironic.
A CEO with a personal net worth of 15.5 billion US dollars, who promised to donate 80% of his wealth, is worried that his employees only care about money. Then he asks the candidate during the interview: Will you still stay here if the stock price falls to zero?
This kind of division is a unique distortion of AI companies in this era —
On one hand, it packages all the work that human beings can hand over to AI into 30 trillion US dollars and presents it to Wall Street.
On the other hand, it turns the same IPO into an interview question, asking everyone who wants to join: If all of this goes to zero, will you still stay?
References: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-expected-to-tell-investors-it-sees-over-30-trillion-in-potential-revenue-a611efea
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "AI Era", written by ASI Revelation, edited by Solomon, published with authorization from 36Kr.