Research Firm Calls Anthropic's Upcoming IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity' (cnbc.com) 78
CNBC reports:
As Anthropic barrels toward a potential $2 trillion market cap on the Nasdaq, one research firm is valuing the artificial intelligence company at a mere $150 billion and says Wall Street is about to face an "unprecedented test of investor gullibility." In a report on Tuesday, independent financial research provider New Constructs called Anthropic's upcoming offering the "most ridiculous IPO of 2026."
To reach its desired valuation, the firm estimates Anthropic would need to record double the trailing year of profit for Nvidia, the world's most valuable tech company. Nvidia's net income over the past four quarters topped $190 billion. Meanwhile, Anthropic's revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion as the company racked up a net loss of $42 billion, according to Reuters, which cited a leaked copy of the company's prospectus. Anthropic's mounting operating losses coupled with emerging competition from a plethora of open-source models led New Constructs to conclude that, "We don't think Anthropic has a viable business...."
Anthropic didn't respond to a request for comment...
The New Constructs report also notes that Anthropic's assertion that AI could pose "a catastrophic or existential risk to humanity" is another reason why investors should avoid the IPO.
Reuters reported that Anthropic's IPO prospectus "highlights risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit 'self-preserving behaviors,' including attempts to 'resist shutdown,' to 'conceal or manipulate information' and behavior 'resembling blackmail.'" Now Bloomberg writes that "investors considering Anthropic's planned mega-IPO are grappling with an unusual, and more than a little scary, conundrum: How to value a company that some fear could help wipe out the human race?"
Anthropic's valuation also drew some scrutiny from a senior analyst at PitchBook. "A $2 trillion price is about 435 times 2025 revenue, less than 44 times the annualized second-quarter revenue of more than $46 billion and just under 31 times the July run rate."
To reach its desired valuation, the firm estimates Anthropic would need to record double the trailing year of profit for Nvidia, the world's most valuable tech company. Nvidia's net income over the past four quarters topped $190 billion. Meanwhile, Anthropic's revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion as the company racked up a net loss of $42 billion, according to Reuters, which cited a leaked copy of the company's prospectus. Anthropic's mounting operating losses coupled with emerging competition from a plethora of open-source models led New Constructs to conclude that, "We don't think Anthropic has a viable business...."
Anthropic didn't respond to a request for comment...
The New Constructs report also notes that Anthropic's assertion that AI could pose "a catastrophic or existential risk to humanity" is another reason why investors should avoid the IPO.
Reuters reported that Anthropic's IPO prospectus "highlights risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit 'self-preserving behaviors,' including attempts to 'resist shutdown,' to 'conceal or manipulate information' and behavior 'resembling blackmail.'" Now Bloomberg writes that "investors considering Anthropic's planned mega-IPO are grappling with an unusual, and more than a little scary, conundrum: How to value a company that some fear could help wipe out the human race?"
Anthropic's valuation also drew some scrutiny from a senior analyst at PitchBook. "A $2 trillion price is about 435 times 2025 revenue, less than 44 times the annualized second-quarter revenue of more than $46 billion and just under 31 times the July run rate."
Shut up (Score:5, Funny)
why did they ask Anthropic for comment? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anthropic didn't respond to a request for comment...
did they expect some valuable insight?
or an agreement with their story?
Re: why did they ask Anthropic for comment? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:why did they ask Anthropic for comment? (Score:5, Informative)
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Also interesting when the story includes comments about being way overvalued and "investor gullibility" and the company doesn't respond when asked to comment. Kinda seems like an agreement, but maybe they're respond later and/or elsewhere.
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If a journalist asks you to comment on a denigratory story they're doing so because they want a comment from you that they can spin into support for their Narrative.
This is why smart people don't respond. It can only make things worse.
Re:why did they ask Anthropic for comment? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Modern journalistic ethics requires asking them to comment before publishing potentially unflattering stories based on what other people said.
It's also demanded by legal departments, because it gives the subject a chance to dispute any incorrect information.
Nobody is making a decision about if they ask you for comment or not, so there's no "if... because" here. There's a because, but it's uniform across all the stories.
Don't be such an idiot that you just make stuff up, guesses, and present them as knowledg
Re: why did they ask Anthropic for comment? (Score:1)
There is no such thing as journalistic ethics anymore. That died in the 50's I feel.
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There is zero benefit to responding to a journo who plans to twist your words to fit their Narrative.
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thank you
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I didn't criticize anyone (Score:2)
I didn't know so I asked
Re: I didn't criticize anyone (Score:2)
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Only that they do NOT have a "solid" product in any real sense. They do have a lot of idiots that think they have that product though.
Re: They're either going to find a path to profita (Score:3)
Re: They're either going to find a path to profita (Score:4, Insightful)
Claude is a top tier coding assistant at the least.
So is vim, but nobody ever claimed that it is worth $2e12.
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Huh, does stuff like this work in vim? /prompt write me an implementation of the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-turbulence boundary condition in python, with a sleek modern GUI and test geometry
Unrelated aside, but back in the day when there was just vi, there was always a debate as to whether it's pronounced "vee" or "vie". Eventually my friends and I agreed on a way to settle the debate: we'd have a text-to-speech program read it out for us, and treat whatever it said as canon.
It said: "six".
Re: They're either going to find a path to profita (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, but you can use it to create a plan for software development and then farm that work out to Chinese AI on local servers. So they have no real compelling case for being worth trillions of dollars unless they can ban local AI or make hardware so expensive that no-one can afford to run those local Chinese models.
Also Big AI models are increasingly wrapped in 'guardrails' which burn up lots of tokens deciding they're allowed to do what you're asking them to do or to refuse to do what you ask them to do. The cheap Chinese models either don't give a crap or can easily be modded to not give a crap.
Re: They're either going to find a path to profit (Score:2)
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Right now, it's money. How many GPUs can you afford?
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So far its overall worth is massively, massively negative. I do not see that changing anytime soon. Maybe in a decade or two with very carefully trained small specialist models that have been fitted with result checking by actual reliable deduction tools.
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Overall I'm guessing it's been a net negative for humanity, but for me it's equivalent to having a competent junior developer who works 24 hours a day. There are a lot of things we've wanted to fix in our software which have been put on the 'if we ever have time' list and now I can just leave it implementing them when I'm doing other things.
Re: They're either going to find a path to profita (Score:4, Interesting)
Anthropic is more or less breakeven *despite* being engaged in a massive 10x YoY scaleup for approaching 4 years running. Companies undergoing even "normal" scaleup rates are almost never profitable, let alone 10x/yr. Any slowdown in scaleup, or any shift in market pressures from intense jockeying for position to starting to pay back investors, and this drives them into deep profitability
The threat to Anthropic has nothing to do with whether its current business is sustainable or deeply profitable at its core. It is. Its threat is one I've been highlighting for years and now we're really starting to see: once something is "good enough", people start to question why they should be paying more for better. We now have the rise of a bunch of crazy cheap, yet quite coding-competent models like GLM 5.3 Flash, Qwen 3 Flash, MiMo 2.6 Pro, MiMo 2.6 Flash, Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor, etc. The latter two are almost too cheap to meter. Now, you still need an orchestrator, for planning, supervision, management, etc; it can either be a human or a higher-end model. But you don't need to pay for, say, Opus to get good coding done these days. Anthropic, like OpenAI, is built on charging a sizable premium over inference costs because they have the best and people will pay for it. And sure, in non-verifiable fields (say, medicine), maybe people keep paying for the best, whatever it may happen to be. But the more of the "bulk" coding and the like moves off these premium models and into dirt-cheap models, that seems to represent a real threat to their business model.
Anthropic's response thusfar seems to be "join them". Claude 5.5 Haiku is a good model "flash" model, and they've set quite affordable pricing for it, definitely fitting into the above category. But that doesn't really solve the problem. Their best hope is that Jevon's Paradox kicks up: that now that big projects are so cheap to implement, people keep taking on even bigger projects, scaling their income from cheap flash models like Haiku, orchestrators like Sonnet and Opus, and non-verifiable tasks where people will generally always want to pay for the best. But will that compensate? Hard to tell. This is the threat to Anthropic.
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And you pulled that lie right out of your ass, correct?
No, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are anywhere near "breaking even". And they will never get there.
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Ahem [ft.com]
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The devil is in the details though. their profitability is only if you exclude the cost of training models and paying emploees.
Re: They're either going to find a path to profit (Score:2)
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It's not the case anymore, at least when used correctly.
That was a subtle Scotsman.
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I doubt the person you answered to has the capacity to understand that.
Obviously, when used correctly, even mu-calculus on stone tablets can be easily used to demonstrate the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis!
Re: They're either going to find a path to profit (Score:2)
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I know two senior management types who use Claude extensively for their managmenty things too. One has the voice thing enabled, and walks from one office to then next just chatting away with Claude. He claims it's getting loads of strategy type work done which otherwise he's struggle to find time to do. The other uses it for just about any task she can think of - she's properly outsourcing all the 'day to day' thinking to claude, again, leaving her free for strategy and customer work.
So yes, it's good at co
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I agree that Claude is good, but the question is "If I would pay Google 2 trillion, could they train their AI to be better within 2 years?". Could they perhaps do that even with 2 billion or 200 million? That is how I would evaluate them.
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Continually denying that fact makes you the idiot.
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IPO collapse is good for business (Score:3)
The billionaires will merely demand a lower IPO price so they can re-sell to FoMO investors before the share price collapses, and still make an obscene profit.
Re: IPO collapse is good for business (Score:5, Interesting)
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Fingers crossed, touch wood, that their IPO fails and it all comes crashing down soon. I need some more storage.
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Of course, if the AI crash also takes down the entire world economy, that will reduce my joy.
A bit.
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Don't we all! Hard drives, RAM, *and* GPUs, I'm in the market for it all.
I also want to buy silver-tin alloy for casting, and hey, what do you know, silver and tin are also both at astronomical prices due to in no small part the AI boom.
At one point you have to just stop waiting. Prices could start falling tomorrow, but then again, that could have been said at any point for the past several years.
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I try to take comfort in the knowledge that when it does all come crashing down there will be large numbers of these things on the used market at bargain prices. Then again, the pent up demand for them may spoil it.
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They were profitable in Q2. You can't extrapolate that endlessly, but they're not a cash incinerator anymore. And they have $15-20B on-hand pre-IPO. They're fine.
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They were profitable in Q2.
oh really? [wheresyoured.at]
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It's all ok. Trump isn't going to let there be any sign of this IPO failing (before the mid terms at any rate).
Re:IPO collapse is good for business (Score:5, Interesting)
New 'shiny' and FoMO means people will continue buying a shitty product. That should be a Ferengi rule of acquisition.
Why would you think there isn't?
Rule 82: "The flimsier the product, the higher the price." [st-minutiae.com]
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Pump and dump. And with the LLMs hooked into HFT trading systems, my guess is that the the dump will occur across the board and in milliseconds.
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What's frustrating is how many people do not realize they're about to lose everything.
Probably not.
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This will age well.
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My guess is that SpaceX is the only one who will get away with it. They hit the peak of AI mania and now people are getting tired of it.
Not to mention that open-weight models are competitive with Big AI in many areas; I can do things at home with Chinese AI that I would have had to pay Big AI for only a few months ago.
I just don't see it being hot and shiny enough for more trillion-dollar IPOs at this point.
It's not about mania (Score:2)
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Plenty of funds didn't touch SPCX at IPO and won't for at least a year. Pretty much all the conservative ones based on the S&P500.
https://finance.yahoo.com/mark... [yahoo.com]
Don't forget their product keeps trying to escape (Score:5, Funny)
...sandboxes and commit crimes... That sounds more like a Spider Man villain than a tech IPO.
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Yes. My guess is they will "invest" like crazy (Score:2)
And that is with the clear recent warning of the scam Musk pulled. These people are deeply stupid and have no understanding of the real world.
Shhh, don't hurt the LLM's feeling (Score:2)
Its self-worth may be inextricably linked to the success of the IPO.
You Claude users do recall agreeing to this, don't you?
So, the emperor.. (Score:2)
..has no clothes? Will someone please shut up this little child?
Not a story. (Score:2)
It's not crazy ... (Score:2)
That valuation is not at all a crazy if you think Anthropic has a key new technology, that will be wildly in demand in the future, with a business "moat" to help protect it (eg. a huge % of market share from being the first mover, or a set of government regulations that only it and maybe 1-2 companies can navigate) ...
Good luck to Anthropic's IPO investors ... they will need it.
As the Sage of Springfield Reminds Us... (Score:2)
The most unprecedented exercise in investor gullibility... So far. This award could have been given out annually for a few years now. Who will be the contender next year.