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Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

reuters.com

51–60 of 74 posts

Re: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

#51

> "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time" Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations (referencing spacex as the first)? (I imagine openai will likely be in the same ballpark) genuinely we're reaching "elementary levels of big funny number" in the market.

The "valuation" is based on market capitalization, so the market "supports" it because of the mass hysteria of "perceived value." When a big IPO gets automatically added to a major stock index (such as NASDAQ or S&P 500), all the mutual funds which include holdings that mirror the indexes will automatically buy and hold shares. Lots of employee 401k money and pension fund investments are supporting the mutual funds, which are perceived as "safe."

To put it in fewer words; the stock market is rigged.

Re: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value. API prices are paid by companies getting tens of millions of dollars of value. In normal life money is the key constraint; buy this don't buy that etc. - whereas in VC funded companies the constraint is time. If you as a founder get funding and don't spend it fast enough you put yourself at serious risk of being replaced. When enough of the world op…

It doesn't, though. $200/mo of Claude may give you what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create in 2023, but the value of what it creates isn't there anymore. It should be compared against what it would cost to create with other tools, not against the cost of you doing it by hand. Otherwise would be like justifying an obviously overpriced car, because "it saves me so much compared to carrying things th…

Your comparison is wrong

It's not an expensive car vs. any car.

It's car vs. no car.

Re: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

#53

> "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time" Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations (referencing spacex as the first)? (I imagine openai will likely be in the same ballpark) genuinely we're reaching "elementary levels of big funny number" in the market.

Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations

Suppose there are 100 million jobs that can benefit from spending $10k/year in tokens. At a conservative 30% margin and subtracting $100 billion for expenses that's $200 billion in annual profits, which can easily support a $5T market cap. And that's just scaling up today's use cases, not even considering the possibility of labs having their secret internal models doing drug discovery or quant trading or other profitable hobbies.

Re: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

#54
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value. API prices are paid by companies getting tens of millions of dollars of value. In normal life money is the key constraint; buy this don't buy that etc. - whereas in VC funded companies the constraint is time. If you as a founder get funding and don't spend it fast enough you put yourself at serious risk of being replaced. When enough of the world op…

> 200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value. That may well be true, but the same tens of thousands of dollars of value can be purchased for a fraction of the 200usd Anthropic asks.... therefore why not? And even beyond pure monetary considerations, it often refuses to help as soon as its trigger happy safeguards kick in, can't debug a lot of code before it decides to stop helping IME.

It's less fungible than you think.

Below a certain threshold prices are effectively all the same.

Companies pay API prices because part of the bundle is a trust anchor / liability shield: "we bought Anthropic's thing! We didn't risk it! We paid for ZDR!"

Re: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

#55
post #43
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese companies will need to pay their bills eventually too.

> The Chinese companies will need to pay their bills eventually too. What bills? Deepseek has been profitable for long time.

Do you have a source I can read? All I see on Google are random blog posts mostly debunking that idea. Profit margins on API tokens isn't the same as running a profitable long term business, or bringing returns on the large amount of funding they got.

Re: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

#56

> "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time" Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations (referencing spacex as the first)? (I imagine openai will likely be in the same ballpark) genuinely we're reaching "elementary levels of big funny number" in the market.

Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations Suppose there are 100 million jobs that can benefit from spending $10k/year in tokens. At a conservative 30% margin and subtracting $100 billion for expenses that's $200 billion in annual profits, which can easily support a $5T market cap. And that's just scaling up today's use cases, not even considering th…

100 million jobs is an insane number.

Re: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

#57
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're primarily writing code yourself or meticulously reviewing the output from agents, then you're right. However, if you tried to have any of those models one-shot an app or do some highly agentic work, they would certainly fail. That's the future people are looking towards with these valuations: when its no longer economical for humans to write or even understand code, just let the models drive because they ar…

But.. what is it that anthropic does that cannot be replicated by open models teamed up with open source? Heck open source even has cheap AI to help write the code now.

The moat is money. How do you get more money? Point to your moat and ask for more money!

Re: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't, though. $200/mo of Claude may give you what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create in 2023, but the value of what it creates isn't there anymore. It should be compared against what it would cost to create with other tools, not against the cost of you doing it by hand. Otherwise would be like justifying an obviously overpriced car, because "it saves me so much compared to carrying things th…

Your comparison is wrong It's not an expensive car vs. any car. It's car vs. no car.

Is it? Because you can just download a car now.

Re: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

#59
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I walk to work and ride a bicycle in my free time, don’t see why anybody would need a hatchback or semi truck or build rockets. Idiots

Is the market for the "rockets" enough to justify what these frontier labs are spending yearly?

Anthropic’s revenue run rate just hit $50B, in a market that didn’t exist 5 years ago and was 10% of its current size 1 year ago. They are, by far, the fastest growing company in human history. The demand for “rockets” has been pretty high and growing ever since they started supplying it.

Anthropic and its investors/customers don’t need random internet commenter’s permission to decide whether or not something is worth doing or justified.

Personally I think when something doesn’t make sense to you, you should try to figure out why it makes sense to other people, and whether they might have different needs/constraints/incentives/skills/knowledge.

Why might people spend more on AI as it gets better, rather than less? Could they, perhaps, allow for entirely new kinds of capabilities and products that hacker news commenters have not yet seen? As they have done every year for 3 straight years (hacker news has been wrong in exactly the same way every time, btw)? Might some people prefer to spend $10/day to work with the most capable AI available, due to the amount they use it while doing their job, and its effect on output? Do some people use AI for more than just tinkering with open source harnesses? Could it be that when you don’t understand something, there really is a way to explain it, that isn’t “everybody else must be stupid”?

Re: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't, though. $200/mo of Claude may give you what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create in 2023, but the value of what it creates isn't there anymore. It should be compared against what it would cost to create with other tools, not against the cost of you doing it by hand. Otherwise would be like justifying an obviously overpriced car, because "it saves me so much compared to carrying things th…

Your comparison is wrong It's not an expensive car vs. any car. It's car vs. no car.

No, you are wrong. Or at least, incomplete.

The comment I replied to said "I need Claude because it's better than no AI.

That's like saying "I need the Porsche because it's better than no car".

Making a "car vs no car" argument is not an argument for an expensive car. Making an argument for an expensive car, requires both car vs no car, and expensive car vs any car. This is what I was pointing out above.

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