Anthropic plans to list in November. Until this week, investors worked with a valuation of roughly $2 trillion. After Wednesday’s investor day in San Francisco, a different number is making the rounds: about $1.5 trillion. Reuters reports this citing four people familiar with the matter, three of whom were in the room.
The quarter was fine, the curve wasn’t
The figures themselves are not bad figures. Anthropic told prospective IPO investors that third-quarter revenue hit $16.8 billion, up 45% from the previous quarter, and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis for the first time. I wrote about the Q3 numbers yesterday.
The comparison is where it hurts. From Q1 to Q2, revenue more than doubled, to $11.6 billion. From Q2 to Q3, it added 45%. Both are growth rates most companies would kill for, but anyone justifying a $2 trillion valuation is extrapolating the first curve, not the second. According to Reuters, that slowdown is what left part of the audience disappointed.
Who was in the room
Mostly Anthropic’s most prominent backers. They met CEO Dario Amodei and finance chief Krishna Rao. Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment. The Information had reported earlier that investors were weighing a lower number; Reuters is the first to put a figure on it.
The backdrop doesn’t help. Tech stocks sold off this week, data-center operators and neoclouds such as CoreWeave are under pressure, SB Energy delayed its listing and Holtec Nuclear pulled its plans altogether. Anthropic, meanwhile, has committed to spending at least $518 billion over a decade on cloud services, compute and infrastructure.
This listing carries more than itself
Half a trillion less is a setback Anthropic could do without. What’s more interesting is what hangs off it: many investors see the next phase of the AI market riding on this one share sale, and on a possible OpenAI listing after it. A cool reception in November would be a market story, not an Anthropic story.
What strikes me is how fast the yardstick moved. A company whose revenue grew roughly twelvefold last year to nearly $4.6 billion posts a quarter up 45% and counts as a letdown. That says less about Anthropic than about the expectations now baked into these shares.