Is Anthropic worth 2 trillion US dollars?

If nothing unexpected happens, we may witness the largest IPO in history by the end of this year.

Multiple media reports state that Anthropic is seeking a public listing at a valuation of 2 trillion US dollars, with a planned fundraising of around 100 billion US dollars. For comparison, the IPO valuation Musk sought for SpaceX after merging it with xAI in June this year was only 1.77 trillion US dollars.

However, as the listing timeline draws nearer, the market has begun to question Anthropic's extremely high valuation. At a recent investor communication event held by Anthropic, some investors started to value Anthropic at a valuation level of 1.5 trillion US dollars.

The direct trigger is that Anthropic's growth rate is no longer as high as before. Even though Anthropic disclosed at the investor communication day that the company's revenue quarter-on-quarter growth rate in the third quarter of this year still reached 45%, and the single-quarter revenue was more than 3 times that of the whole of last year, it has dropped sharply from the 147% growth rate in the second quarter, which disappointed some investors.

Wall Street has high hopes for Anthropic's path to listing. To a certain extent, Anthropic's IPO directly reflects the prosperity of the entire AI industry. If the listing does not go smoothly, it will also affect the listing prospects of other companies. Previously, OpenAI has postponed its IPO to next year.

Anthropic is still continuously releasing positive news to boost confidence for its upcoming IPO. They disclosed at the investor communication day that the company has achieved adjusted profitability in the third quarter. According to previous media reports, Anthropic recorded an operating loss of more than 8 billion US dollars for the whole of last year.

Up to now, Anthropic has completed nearly 20 rounds of financing in total, with the total financing amount reaching as high as 1250 billion US dollars. In May this year, Anthropic announced the completion of a 650 billion US dollars Series H financing, with a post-investment valuation of 9.65 trillion US dollars.

Growth Has Slowed Down

For a startup company that has been established for only 5 years, Anthropic's growth can be described as a miracle.

Last year, Anthropic's total annual revenue was only 4.6 billion US dollars. But in the first quarter of this year alone, the single-quarter revenue reached 4.7 billion US dollars, exceeding the total revenue of last year. In the second quarter, Anthropic's revenue further increased to 11.6 billion US dollars, with a quarter-on-quarter growth rate as high as 147%. In half a year, the company's revenue has reached more than three times that of the whole of last year.

The explosive popularity of Claude Code has contributed a lot. Anthropic officially opened Claude Code to the public in May last year, focusing on programming scenarios, and it quickly became popular since the end of last year.

In February this year, Anthropic disclosed externally that the annualized revenue of Claude Code has exceeded 2.5 billion US dollars, more than doubling compared to the beginning of the year. Among them, the growth comes more from B-end customers, the number of enterprise subscriptions has increased to four times that at the beginning of the year, and enterprise usage contributes more than half of the revenue.

Claude Code

The number of large customers is also increasing rapidly. In February this year, Anthropic had more than 500 enterprise customers with annualized expenditure exceeding 1 million US dollars, and the number had exceeded 1000 by the beginning of April. Anthropic's annualized revenue has also jumped from about 9 billion US dollars at the end of last year to more than 30 billion US dollars in early April, and further exceeded 47 billion US dollars in early May.

At that time, the "Token maxxing" trend was prevalent among Silicon Valley tech companies. Many tech companies including Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon widely implemented internal Token ranking systems to encourage employees to use AI more to complete work. But at the same time, such measures also spawned a lot of unnecessary computing power consumption, and some employees' personal monthly Token consumption even reached as high as more than 280 billion.

Anthropic benefited a lot from this, and even faced a shortage of computing power for a time. To meet the demand, Anthropic successively signed large computing power agreements with Amazon, Google, Broadcom, Microsoft and NVIDIA, and cooperated with Fluidstack to build data centers. In May this year, Anthropic also leased all the computing power of SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center.

However, entering the third quarter, Anthropic's growth slowed down significantly, with the quarter-on-quarter revenue growth rate dropping to about 45%, and the new revenue added in a single quarter dropped from about 6.9 billion US dollars in the second quarter to about 5.2 billion US dollars.

Anthropic's annualized revenue growth also seems to fall short of market expectations. Previously, some investors had optimistically estimated that Anthropic's annualized revenue at the end of the year would far exceed 100 billion US dollars. But according to the estimate of research institution SemiAnalysis, Anthropic's current annualized revenue is about 74 billion US dollars.

Anthropic said part of the reason for the revenue decrease is that they have strengthened control over distillation. Previously, Anthropic has been accusing other AI companies of distilling its own models, but these distillations also brought considerable revenue at the same time. According to reports from the Financial Times, Anthropic disclosed that distillation-related revenue accounts for about 5%-7% of total revenue.

Merely attributing the slowdown to distillation still does not seem sufficient to explain Anthropic's sharply fallen quarterly growth rate. Some market analyses believe that the competitive pressure from OpenAI and a large number of Chinese open-source models may be the direct cause of Anthropic's growth slowdown.

Since the beginning of this year, OpenAI has continuously updated its models and Codex programming tools, diverting the fastest-growing programming market of Anthropic. At the same time, cheaper Chinese open-source models have further increased price pressure, forcing Anthropic and OpenAI to cut prices to cope.

Joey Brookhart, an analyst at SemiAnalysis, told the Financial Times that over the past three months, investors have been lowering their expectations for Anthropic's annualized revenue. "Now Anthropic is in a two-horse race, instead of dominating the market as it did in the first half of the year."

More Massive Computing Power Expenditure

Different from the past when Anthropic's management always emphasized the dangers and hidden risks of AI on various occasions, at this investor exchange meeting, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Krishna Rao, CFO of Anthropic, focused on introducing the company's operation and profitability.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

In addition to disclosing that the company achieved adjusted profitability in the third quarter, Anthropic also achieved positive cash flow. For every 1 US dollar they invest in computing power, they can get 1.7 US dollars in revenue. After excluding share-based payment expenses, the company's adjusted operating profit margin for this quarter is 11%.

A year ago, Anthropic's revenue was far from enough to cover its expenses. The prospectus obtained by Reuters shows that Anthropic's revenue last year was about 4.6 billion US dollars, operating expenses were about 126.5 billion US dollars, and operating losses exceeded 8 billion US dollars. Among them, computing power and infrastructure expenditures were about 7.3 billion US dollars, which was higher than the total revenue of the year.

Computing power is a cost black hole that all AI companies cannot avoid. In order to maintain technological leadership, large model companies have to invest huge costs in computing power training, and as the user scale and call volume grow, reasoning expenses are also continuing to increase. Among the already listed Zhipu AI and Minimax in China, more than 70% of R&D investment is used for computing power.

Anthropic's computing power expenditure is even higher. According to Reuters reports, Anthropic disclosed in its prospectus that its committed expenditures on cloud services, computing power and infrastructure with six partners in the next ten years will reach at least 5.18 trillion US dollars. About 80% of them are non-cancellable, or payment is required regardless of whether they are used or not.

Google and Amazon account for the majority of it. Anthropic promised to pay Google at least 111.1 billion US dollars from April 2026 to July 2033, and pay Amazon 110 billion US dollars from May 2026 to April 2036. According to the contract, even if the actual usage expenditure is insufficient, the company needs to make up the difference.

The agreement with Microsoft involves 31.4 billion US dollars, with the payment period lasting from November this year to May 2033. In addition, Anthropic also undertakes about 161.2 billion US dollars in equipment lease obligations related to Broadcom, most of which are also non-cancellable.

Anthropic tried to explain to investors the necessity of huge computing power expenditure. Anthropic said that computing power acquisition is becoming a key constraint for the development of artificial intelligence, and the demand for advanced artificial intelligence systems in the future is likely to exceed the available supply, and will be "mainly limited by the availability of computing power".

Only the total accumulated funds of about 1250 billion US dollars that Anthropic obtained through financing is still not enough to cover the almost sky-high computing power bill. Anthropic's prospectus shows that as of December 31 last year, Anthropic's total cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments were only 202.8 billion US dollars.

After the record-breaking 650 billion US dollars Series H financing, if Anthropic wants to get more financial support, IPO is almost the only option. According to previous media reports, Anthropic plans to raise 1000 billion US dollars in scale, which will become the largest IPO in the world in history.

But for Anthropic, whose growth rate is slowing down at present, the market no longer seems willing to give a higher premium.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Shanshang", written by He Jian, and is authorized for release by 36Kr.