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JosephjackJRtoday at 10:22 AM7 repliesview on HN

Anthropic is burning roughly $1B a quarter right now, has no clear path to profitability, and is still riding on the same “we’re the safe AI” narrative that’s starting to wear thin as everyone else catches up on safety tooling. Their revenue run-rate is reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best, which would put them at a price-to-sales multiple of 50–100× if they actually hit that valuation. For context, OpenAI at its last round was “only” ~80B on similar (or higher) revenue expectations. The moat feels increasingly shaky too. Claude is great, but the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2, and the open-source frontier is shrinking fast, and they’re still heavily dependent on AWS credits rather than owning their own infra like Google or Meta. At $300B they’d be priced for perfection in a world where perfection doesn’t exist yet. I’d be shocked if it actually prices anywhere near that. Curious what others think.


Replies

jascha_engtoday at 3:30 PM

> reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best

They are expected to hit 9 billion by end of year. Meaning the valuation multiple is only 30x. Which is still steep but at that growth rate not totally unreasonable.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/anthropic-expects-b2b-dema...

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pu_petoday at 10:51 AM

The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models. Also, Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.

The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also has far lower costs due to TPUs. Claude Code is neat but in the long run will definitely be replicated.

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trjordantoday at 3:03 PM

> the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2 ... is shrinking fast

Are you ... aware that OpenAI and Google have launched more recent models?

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nbardytoday at 4:06 PM

You haven’t actually looked at their fundamentals. They’re profitable serving current models including training costs and are only losing money on future RD training, but if you project future revenue growth on future generations of models you get a clear path to profitability.

They charge higher costs than OpenAI and have faster growing API demand. They have great margins compared to the rest of the industry on inference.

Sure the revenue growth could stop but it hasn’t and there is no reason to think it will.

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LatteLazytoday at 12:41 PM

1. Sounds like exactly when early investors and insiders would want to cash in and when retail investors who “have heard of the company and like the product” will buy without a lot of financial analysis.

2. A 300bn IPO can mean actually raising n 300bn by selling 100% of the company. But it could also mean seeing 1% for 3bn right? Which seems like a trivial amount for the market to absorb no?

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whp_wesseltoday at 3:44 PM

is this comment created by AI? acc created in last 24 hours, lots of long ai-speak