alt Hacker NewsAnthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T
Comments
I've been using the $32/month (AUD) subscription, but finally dipped into extra credits to get a task over the line yesterday after I hit my 5-hr limit.
And my god, $15 of extra credits ended up giving me only 30 minutes of Claude Code before running out.
The subscription prices can not be financially sustainable. There is no way that is remotely close to the actual cost of running.
Looking at the S-1 lockup schedule the IPO seems doomed. They need to bring in a ton of investment, and you will have massive unlocks right as the next congress is most active authoring anti-AI bills. Who's going to buy this?
I'm not convinced that 2026 was peak of the AI hype cycle.
Arguments are being made that, with the midterms over and 2028 just around the corner, a less sympathetic administration would create significant headwinds, adjusting the valuation of Anthropic and OpenAI down.
What we don't know are what Anthropic and OpenAI have planned and in the works.
A large population of extremely skilled and talented people are being laid off by their employers to make space for AI investments. It's likely a significant number of them will start their own business with AI.
AI is also gaining a much wider audience and acceptance. It's likely over the next few years, AI demand will grow, not stagnate.
That said, IPOs are usually liquidity events for LPs and for something really disruptive and unpredictable as AI, I won't be engaging in their IPOs. Only time will tell if this was a good decision, or bad.
Can someone help me understand - I have tried local AI/LLMs.
Lets set aside speed. The results are ALWAYS terrible compared to CLaude Code.
Sure I only have a 12GB GPU - is that what it is? If I had a 32GB CPU would the experience be as amazing as Claude Code is?
Why is my experience of local LLMs so average?
I am retired and use index funds for my 401Ks. I hate the idea of Anthropic becoming part of mandatory purchases into retirement funds. I hope it doesn’t happen.
That said, Anthropic is an interesting company. I mostly use local models like Qwen 3.8 Next Flash, but when I occasionally use Opus 5.5 for difficult I enjoy the experience.
I (all other issues aside) honestly think we have lost all sanity when the term "low" (in any fashion) can end up associated with 1.1 TRILLION.-
There is a serious, malignant, dangerous disarray somewhere in our callibration of value, of worth, of what things are worth. Something, many things, are wrong here.-
My impression is that none of those systems seems to be efficient. We see time after time systems that solves most 80% of the case to be 90% cheaper. And the way it is, it seems to me that nor openai nor Anthropic can keep the current prices.
Some say that if Anthropic keep delivering improvements and be the first it will make it but for that, you need to disregard all competition from other llm companies and from other competitor systems.
And even though they have the smartest model ever, if someone offers something 90% of it for 90% cheaper it will be worth it.
We already see plenty of companies reducing ai cost because they don't see enough roi
I've been trying to generate some product videos with opus 5.5 and I use the API because I don't like subscriptions.
I burned about $150 of tokens over a few hours of chatting, although opus 5.5 did generate some 10-30kb html files at a time, containing the "videos".
I think subscriptions are extremely subsidized still and what happened yesterday was just a small dip of what's to come.
And there are worries about the Democratic midterm election sweep causing tighter scrutiny of new data centers and forcing Anthropic to pay wholesale for chips, or worse.
can someone explain to me the point of the 'initial valuation', considering ultimately the price will settle lated thorugh trading to perceived value anyway ?
1.1T is 27% less than what they are aiming at, and yet, it’s still absolutely mind boggling.
People love to reign in AI companies these days (and part of it is warranted) but the triple digit annual increase in revenue at Anthropic and others (SpaceX being in that category as well) is something never seen before.
Some people are being too quick (or too willing) to disregard the obvious immense economic impact of AI and company (and I’m not talking about the next-day-ai-crash-incoming economic impact).
Did they consider doing a Dutch auction, like Google did in its IPO[1]?
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/19/es-took-off-but-the-auction-...
Some benchmarks to compare:
Apple: 5 T
Google: 3.5 T
Meta: 1.55 T
Microsoft: 3.97 T
Berkshire Hathaway: 1.2 T
Eli Lilly: 1.28 T
Tesla: 1.38 T
Walmart: 1 T
Spotify: 125 billion
Damodaran placed a fair value of $1.47T minus discount for really bad corporate structure. So $1.3T looks exactly right.
And its kind of circular way of reasoning. As the investors would've actually watched the video and included it in their calculations.
The moat really is shallow to non-existent.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are trying to build more tooling to try and lock companies into their ecosystems.
But I can’t help thinking that they are impacted by the very thing they have created.
You can now build your own enterprise tooling using the very models that they have created.
Inference is projected to continue to become increasingly commoditized so you need to wrap it in compelling and differentiated product people are willing to pay for.
Training, people argue, continue to be very capital intensive so moat there. What I'm wondering, is anyone trying out ideas the lower the training cost materially? I'm not thinking distilling because that, by definition, would always be behind the frontier. Other ways?
Really though we all know how this will play out. Google, Amazon, Microsoft are going to buy out both labs and we will all be centralized again
1.1T is still insanely high. There is absolutely no reason why I can not use any of the OK models as long as I have reasonable hardware ti give a ok token rate.
Here is a video overview of Anthropic's IPO filing by a finance expert. [0] https://youtu.be/PfjsIfXms4o
Still too high
Anyone have a sense of what a valuation like that would mean for employees trying to cash out?
can someone explain to me the point of the 'initial valuation', considering ultimately the price will settle lated thorugh trading to perceived value anyway ?
Some benchmarks to compare against:
Apple: 5 T
Google: 3.5 T
Meta: 1.55 T
Microsoft: 3.97 T
Berkshire Hathaway: 1.2 T
Eli Lilly: 1.28 T
Tesla: 1.38 T
Walmart: 1 T
Spotify: 125 billion
Please explain to me why my "naive and maybe ignorant" understanding of this is wrong... The bigger the IPO price, the more they earn and the more probability is for you to loose money invested in it.
So say Anthropic, or OpenAi, or smartGummyBearsAI go IPO and the price is insanely high... and then spirals down to be 10% of the real price... they earn a lot of money and the public loose a lot of money.
IF smartGummyBearsAI goes 100% realistic price and you buy near the correct price, they earn their fair money and people get an investment.
IF smartGummyBearsAI says that they have technology to use the same machine that makes gummy bears print gpus and they are priced 10,000x their actual price the society just transfers a lot of wealth to them and they scam the society.
Why shouldn't we regulate and aim for the correct price?
Remember 801k money is what we are talking about
using claude code with pro subscription and deepseek api. claude is project manager and deepseek is developer. combo seems pretty effective and efficient.
Related:
Major Investors Are Skeptical Anthropic IPO Can Achieve $1.5T Valuation
anthropic futures on binance dropped again today. why don't they just do a direct listing and then atm share sales ?
Low ???
1T is not low for an IPO
1793898170 | Michael Burry: Anthropic Is "Betting Its Existence on Optimism" | https://mrkt30.com/michael-burry-anthropic-s1-commitments-op... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50381531
1793902395 | So, about that Anthropic IPO | https://www.ft.com/content/2fbd60ee-060a-4957-b9c5-3b5a0ce88... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50382331
1793918987 | Michael Burry says Anthropic is 'betting its existence' on optimism | https://www.businessinsider.com/michael-burry-anthropic-ipo-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50385642
1793923469 | Major Investors Are Skeptical Anthropic IPO Can Achieve $1.5T Valuation | https://www.wsj.com/finance/major-investors-are-skeptical-an... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386375
1793923694 | Anthropic warns that it's close to RSI capability, a.k.a. self-building AI | https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/02/anthropic-warns-that-its-v... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386406
1793924267 | Major Investors Are Skeptical Anthropic IPO Can Achieve $1.5T Valuation | https://www.wsj.com/finance/major-investors-are-skeptical-an... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386483
1793925071 | Major Investors Are Skeptical Anthropic IPO Can Achieve $1.5T Valuation | https://www.wsj.com/finance/major-investors-are-skeptical-an... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386597
1793934067 | About That Anthropic IPO | https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-5... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50387632
1793965329 | Is Anthropic About to Delay the Biggest IPO? | https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/anthropic-about-delay-biggest-i... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50391165
It’s going to drop further, probably well below $1T. Still a multibillion dollar valuation though imo.
Their numbers are shit. They are brittle af. Any shift in political climate results in internal mayhem.
Same with openai
They made a typo, it's more like $11B
SpaceX had insanely great timing. They came in and ate up a lot of the available capital at the most prime the they could.
Antropic will be fine I think but open AI will probably have issues
It keeps dropping. Was 2T, then 1.5T last week, now looking like they might be lucky to get 1T.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthropic delays the IPO in hopes this will all magically sort itself out but as every day passes it looks like they should have gone public this summer when things were still on the up.
Realistically the company is worth in the hundreds of billions but if it goes below 1.1T or so existing investors will need to start booking losses and that will trigger a shitstorm of other issues downstream.
This is all becoming a textbook case of folks know these assets aren’t worth what folks want them to be, but they can keep the game going so long as nobody actually marks the asset at its actual realistic valuation.
So that’s the game underway now. How low can they go without blowing up the whole AI ecosystem. If the valuations here drop next the AI bonds and private loans start to fail en-mass and the whole thing that built up this house of cards starts falling apart in reverse. Get ready for a bumpy ride folks.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they pull the plug on the IPO and go hide under a privately funded rock.
The second one of these AI companies gets a fair valuation and folks start booking losses the whole AI house of cards will come crumbling down. The crazy thing is if they drop below around 1T some existing investors will be booking losses.
A realistic valuation is likely in the hundreds of billions, which would be a total disaster and thus they’re going to do everything possible to avoid that.
literally what is the upside? They're supposedly worth as much as meta despite having nowhere near the customer base or years of work? How much more valuation do they have to trick people into giving them before investors get a return?
The Facebook valuation some 10 years ago was like… 300 million? I mean, I get it, but jeez, when I see headlines like this “as low as(!)”, I need to pinch myself.
It is strange that they have this problem. I thought they achieved superintelligence. Maybe they haven't prompted it right yet.
Compare to SpaceXSI, they lack missiles, datacenters, and a profitable internet business so... yeah.
The future is not local models because by the time you think of what to pipe through the LLM, the super intelligent AGI owned by Anthropic or OpenAI (but not both) would have already mapped it out, generated it and had it in production. You can, however, still pursue living as a hobby.
Simple as. I hope this helps.
potential buyers are discussing about a $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion valuation range for the company, according to people familiar with the matter. Some are weighing a value as low as $1.1 trillion
> Anthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T
AS LOW AS?! This wording has to be intentional... Because I would use "as high as", myself.
And after they went way out of their way to state in their S-1 that they would never dream of valuing the company at $1 more than it was worth?
As "low" as 1.1T. What a world we live in where 1.1T is considered "low"...
Sure, this is a small anecdotal datapoint, but since I've gotten Qwen3.8-Flash-Next running well on my Strix Halo box my Claude Pro subscription use has dropped off a cliff. I'm only at 18% of quota usage this week - this being Friday I would've been at 80% at least in the past. This is just an astonishingly good model that runs locally and quite well on my PC. I do not plan to renew my Claude Pro subscription when it comes up in a couple of months.