NYU professor Aswath Damodaran ("Dean of Valuation"), published a long blog and says Anthropic’s IPO will be priced on run-rate revenue rather than valued on cash flows.
Justifying a $1.5T to $2T value for Anthropic requires very fast early growth, operating margins rising to 30% or more, compute costs growing slower than revenue, and risk falling to average as regulation and business models settle.
H1 2026 losses of $8.7B at Anthropic and $21.6B at OpenAI, excluding non-cash charges, rule out earnings multiples, making ARR the AI equivalent of dot-com eyeballs and social-media user counts.
ARR has no standard: OpenAI’s $50B counts partner sales net, Anthropic’s $65B counts them gross, and grossing up OpenAI produced the roughly $70B figure investors circulated. Both annualize monthly, a choice either can change.
VC rounds here price the IPO rather than value the business: Anthropic’s May round raised $65B at $965B post-money when expected IPO pricing was $1.15T, a haircut for delay or disappointment.
Pricing will likely migrate to 2030 or 2036 revenue and earnings, where 25 times 2036 earnings looks cheap only when wrongly compared with today’s multiples on current earnings.
The cheaper lab depends on the yardstick: at $1.5T to $2T, Anthropic looks cheaper on current and year-end ARR, OpenAI on 2030 revenue, compute and users, and both may simply be overpriced.
No listed pure-play peer exists, since Gemini sits inside Alphabet, xAI inside SpaceX and Muse inside Meta, so Anthropic will be priced against OpenAI’s private rounds or the Mag 7 and SpaceX.