
Anthropic IPO Valuation Calculator: How Much Is It Really Worth?
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Investors in Anthropic’s IPO this month face a pricing challenge unprecedented on Wall Street before.
Few companies have grown as quickly as manufacturer Claude: its sales increased more than 100-fold between 2023 and 2025 and are on track to increase again more than 10-fold this year. As the first purely “frontier” AI research group to go public, demand for a piece of a “once-in-a-generation” company is expected to explode, particularly from retail investors.
But amid this hype, the stock market is growing increasingly concerned about rising infrastructure costs, public backlash, increased competition from U.S. and Chinese rivals, and whether Anthropic’s corporate clients are seeing benefits from their technology spending.
The valuation calculator
Anthropic on Tuesday set its own valuation range between $1.26 billion and $1.41 billion on a fully diluted basis. At the high end of that range, that would be about five times its 2028 revenue, which Goldman Sachs project estimates disclosed at around $273 billion.
The FT’s interactive calculator allows readers to enter their own estimates of Anthropic’s 2028 revenues, along with the multiple they deem most appropriate, to quickly produce an estimate of its valuation.
Price/sales multiples are a common way to add value to fast-growing technology groups. Many traditional investors prefer a price-to-earnings ratio. But a valuation based on Anthropic’s profits is not possible since the company posted a net loss of $104 billion in the first nine months of this year. (Goldman Sachs expects operating losses to continue through 2029.)
What do the experts think?
Arjun Bhatia, an analyst at investment bank William Blair, says a valuation of $1.5 billion seems “entirely reasonable,” at “only seven times” Anthropic’s 2028 revenue estimate of $223 billion. That would put the AI company roughly in line with Microsoft’s price-to-sales multiple. That’s well below racy AI stocks such as Palantir and Cloudflare, both of which trade at more than 20 times 2028 sales, according to data from Visible Alpha.
“In our view, this is an attractive multiple for a unique company like Anthropic that is operating in a technological shift that occurs at best once every few decades,” Bhatia wrote in a research note.
Some investors were alarmed by Anthropic’s slowing growth in the third quarter of this year. But Bhatia said: “We still expect Anthropic to be one of the fastest growing technology companies over the next few years. »
Malik Ahmed Khan, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, estimates that Anthropic is worth about $1.7 billion, based on a forecast of annual revenue growth of 47% between 2027 and 2031 – and sales reaching $360 billion by the end of that period.
But Khan admits that the nascent AI industry is difficult to model. He said Anthropic had an “absolutely ridiculous year” in 2026, but could be threatened by higher infrastructure costs, less adoption by enterprise customers or a resurgence of Google or OpenAI.
Morningstar models a “bull case” of a valuation of $3.4 billion, in which Anthropic’s revenue accelerates to $650 billion by 2031, and a “bear case” where sales only reach $135 billion and the company’s value reaches $500 billion.
Other valuation experts offer a similarly dizzying range of results.
Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, puts forward an “optimistic” valuation estimate of $1.5 trillion, based on sales reaching $1 trillion in 2036, despite the “red flag” of Anthropic’s unusual governance structure.
Damodaran also warns of a “worst case scenario,” in which sales don’t reach $200 billion for a decade and IT costs drive margins to around 10 percent, which would push its equity value below $400 billion and the company “would not survive as a business.” In Damodaran’s “best case” model, Anthropic’s sales soar to $1.5 trillion in a decade, computing power becomes “cheap,” and its valuation reaches $4 trillion.
Even at $1.3 trillion, at the low end of its projected range, Anthropic would be worth more than Berkshire Hathaway or Walmart and would rank just behind Tesla among the 10 most valuable public companies in the United States.
The stock is expected to begin trading on or shortly after November 19.
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