Anthropic Could Be Worth $2 Trillion When It Goes Public (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0184959893
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/08/13/1846256/anthropic-could-be-worth-2-trillion-when-it-goes-public
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/anthropic-could-be-worth-2-trillion-when-it-goes-public/
> Anthropic investors expect the AI startup to [1]float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more in October , a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab's debut the largest-ever initial public offering. Half a dozen of the company's backers told the FT that Anthropic's rapidly rising revenue would enable it to more than double its current valuation in a planned autumn float. A listing at that level could unlock billions of dollars in gains for the five-year-old company's early investors but would also test public markets that are growing more nervous about the AI boom.
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> Anthropic's backers say booming demand for the lab's advanced AI models and tools justifies their lofty expectations. Investors expect the Claude maker's annualized revenue to be between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026 -- using the startup's preferred measure, which infers full-year sales from recent performance -- up by more than 10 times over the course of 2026. "If Anthropic is growing 800 percent a year, you'd think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue]," said one investor in the group. "That would make them a $3 trillion company."
According to [2]Bloomberg (paywalled), Anthropic is currently in talks to [3]acquire Decart AI for roughly $6 billion .
"Decart develops world models alongside software designed to lower AI training expenses by improving how efficiently chips are utilized," reports Quartz. "That capability could allow Anthropic to get more out of its current infrastructure as demand grows. If the deal closes, Decart's team would join Anthropic's inference and performance organization."
[1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/anthropic-could-be-worth-2-trillion-when-it-goes-public/
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/anthropic-said-in-talks-to-buy-ai-startup-decart-for-6-billion
[3] https://qz.com/anthropic-decart-acquisition-talks-6-billion-081326
Meanwhile (Score:1, Insightful)
you can't buy RAM or SSDs. Suffer, peon.
business model (Score:3)
What business model recoups all of that investment at a profit?
The one with billions of users?
Wages to Token Purchases (Score:3)
> What business model recoups all of that investment at a profit? The one with billions of users?
The one with most of our wages redirected to payments for Anthropic tokens. Its the ultimate outsourcing.
Re: (Score:3)
>> What business model recoups all of that investment at a profit? The one with billions of users?
> The one with most of our wages redirected to payments for Anthropic tokens. Its the ultimate outsourcing.
Not just our wages, though that's the beginning of the dream. The real dream is creating a perpetual profit machine for the owners while needing absolutely no actual humans, and no need for actual products or commodities involved. Just a bunch of digital bits floating this way and that, creating waves of profit for virtual shipments of nothing. It's a beautiful vision of the future if you're one of the folks directly involved in it. It's a dystopic nightmare that ends the illusion the general population eve
Re: (Score:3)
SpaceX was a massive pump-and-dump, and Anthropic probably is too. Just wish we could hurry up and get to the crash so I can buy some more HDDs.
Re: (Score:2)
> SpaceX was a massive pump-and-dump, and Anthropic probably is too. Just wish we could hurry up and get to the crash so I can buy some more HDDs.
They're trying to make sure the entire AI industry is so up in the rest of the economy's guts that when the crash comes the only choice the government(s) have is to throw money at them until they're whole. When the crash comes, it's going to be fun for about three minutes, and then we're going to start following after it, like passenger's a huge ship as it goes down, the draw of the down-flow will suck a whole hell of a lot of us down with it.
Re: (Score:2)
> SpaceX was a massive pump-and-dump, and Anthropic probably is too. Just wish we could hurry up and get to the crash so I can buy some more HDDs.
Most initial public offerings have a pump and dump element. This doesn’t change the fact that SpaceX is a genuine market leader offering valuable services, an industry innovator and disruptor.
And no, I haven’t bought SpaceX stock yet. Stock price is something different than actual accomplishments, something that doesn’t take away from the latter.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd love to buy into SpaceX the space company. Not so much into SpaceX the AI company. Their valuation is based on xAI and X for a large part, and their outlook on their total addressable market is over 9/10ths AI - a market in which they are at the moment not all that well positioned.
Re: (Score:2)
Be a lot of surplus hardware available at that stage too at bargain basement prices.
Servers, switches, UPS, rack systems, just think of all the recovered RAM , SSDs, and Hard drives that can get reused.
Probably enough there to cause a major slump in various markets
Though by this time the AI overlords have probably set themselves up as in control and they will start recycling people....
Re: (Score:2)
> SpaceX was a massive pump-and-dump
You're already the slashdot granddaddy and undisputed champion of manufactured disinformation and comments that just plain age poorly. So why the need to compete with yourself so fiercely?
SpaceX is not just pump and dump (Score:2)
It is a structured system for looting 10 trillion dollars in 401K money. That is more than just a regular pump and dump.
Re: (Score:2)
$2 trillion dollars would, on an average ROI of expecting a return on your investment in 20 years thus averaging about 3.5% annual return compounded which is a return you can get pretty safely and handily, require Anthropic to return an average of $100 billion dollars a year to investors, every year, starting immediately.
Anthropic's most recent quarter generated $10 billion... in revenue. It was their only profitable quarter on record, with about half a billion in profit. That quarter obviously does not c
Did the LLM come up with $2 Trillion? (Score:2)
Did the LLM come up with the $2 Trillion evaluation? Seems like a hallucination, or ass kissing the current investor that prompted for a valuation.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe Amazon is farming out their billing department's services
They're winning by default (Score:2, Troll)
They're winning by simply not being their competition.
You've got an actually mentally ill guy who doesn't know or care what a budget is, running OpenAI into the ground.
Elon Musk is basically a clueless A.D.D. toddler that doesn't know how the world works and Grok can't be propped up solely by its ability to not be heavily liberally biased
Copilot is just an Indian guy hiring more of his Indian friends, whether they're qualified or not, to make vibe-coded garbage that doesn't work because the design is an
Re: (Score:3)
Well you have Google, and of course Apple could decide to in-source the AI engine if it is so important, they tend to like doing that.
But when it comes to software development, Anthropic certainly has the advantaged position in reputation. However more broad use cases I think are supremely vulnerable to the platform owners of the endpoint devices changing the default. Why do Claude when the hardware button already chats with "some AI". Why leave office 365 that you already are running when office 365 wil
Re: They're winning by default (Score:2)
There's also nothing precluding someone else making some advance in this rapidly moving field that leaves them behind, and nothing prevents China from undercutting them with DCs running on cheap renewable energy in the not too far future.
That's a load bearing could (Score:2)
As ol' Eddie Z would say, could is doing a lot of work there...
LOL! $2 Trillion??? (Score:2)
Try putting that stock all up for sale at once and see how much you get for it! It's like calling Musk a trillionaire, when in reality if he liquidated his assets he'd barely get $100 million.
And I _could_ be a Chippendale's dancer! (Score:2)
I mean, anything is possible, right?
Only through hyperinflation (Score:2)
First they have to find a route to profitability year on year, not just for a month and if you ignore a lot.
Or... We just need for the economy to keep going the way it's going and for the feds to print their way out of the problem, erasing a few zeros of net worth in the process
Value =/= Worth (Score:1)
It may be valued that much, but it's not worth a penny to 99.99999% of people on the planet.
The first company... (Score:2)
that gives me a "do not use AI" checkbox in their systems will get my money. I've seen and experienced too much crap to believe ANY amount of hype.
Though I don't think I'll ever get that. I have a domain whose email is run by the gmail servers, and they ask me about once every two days whether or not I want to add Gemini. One would almost think that after having said "no" about 200 times, they might take the hint, but they keep asking.
Silly statement (Score:2)
I could earn upto $21 million dollars this year.
Leaves open the possibility of me earning 21 cents.
Stupid article with stupid premise.
Now then, about "too big to fail"... (Score:1)
If you IPO for any dollar amount described with the word "trillion" does that instantly make the company "too big to fail"? Does this mean that they should instantly qualify for government bail-outs if/when things go sideways for them? Do they screw hundreds of millions of tax payers to keep a couple thousand douchy-investor-types whole? Or does this particular event signal the dawn of a new day where "too big to fail" should no longer be a thing? Because if your IPO is in the Trillions of Dollars, your
The Epstein class is tired of us (Score:2)
They are tired of being dependent on our labor and our existence as consumers for their wealth and power. They're tired of being the merchant class that's not enough for them. They want to go back to being Kings and emperors and God Kings.
To do that they need to break that dependency because otherwise we can do things like boycotts and strikes or we can just plain not have any money and if we don't have money they don't have money because that's how the system was set up.
AI breaks that system. It's
Heavy Lifting (Score:4, Insightful)
The word "could" in the headline does so much heavy lifting.
Re: (Score:2)
While Anthropic is at least more substantial than other players, this *absolutely* is suspiciously heavy in this summary.
They anticipate that their revenue *could* be $100 billion if they extrapolate some revenue interval of the entire year, and that they will follow up with an unspecfied duration of year over year growth rate of 800%... Which just is an absurd assumption when the starting point is $100 billion.
Re: (Score:2)
The other problem is that while its revenue is high, its expenses are higher. The more it earns, the more it loses.
Thats not a trillion dollar company, thats an economy crashing Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Re: (Score:2)
They will continue to level Oligarch tax on all goods while they work hard on getting rid of you.