A research firm has attacked Anthropic's reported ambition to seek a roughly $2 trillion public-market valuation, arguing that the price would require an implausibly large profit base. The criticism raises a valid investor question about the economics of frontier artificial intelligence. It does not yet constitute an underwrite, because Anthropic had not publicly filed a prospectus when the critique was issued.
New Constructs called the potential offering the most extreme IPO valuation of 2026 and estimated Anthropic's fair value at about $150 billion. Its comparison suggested that a $2 trillion valuation would require the company to generate roughly twice Nvidia's trailing profit. CNBC noted that Nvidia's net income over the prior four quarters exceeded $190 billion.
Reported numbers are not filed numbers
Anthropic said on June 1 that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the SEC, but the number of shares and proposed price had not been determined. A confidential submission begins review; it does not mean the IPO is launched, priced or certain. The company also said its May Series H financing raised $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation and that annualized revenue had exceeded $47 billion earlier that month.
The bearish case relied on media reports and an alleged leaked prospectus, including 2025 revenue of $4.6 billion and a $42 billion net loss. CNBC also cited a later company claim that annualized revenue reached $65 billion by July and reporting that it could approach $100 billion by year-end. Those figures imply extraordinary growth, but they are not a substitute for audited financial statements, offering terms or management's risk disclosures.
The comparison between a revenue run rate and annual net income is especially easy to misuse. A run rate annualizes a recent period; it does not show a full year's recognized revenue, gross margin, operating expense or cash flow. A valuation argument must bridge from usage growth to durable revenue, then to gross profit, infrastructure cost, operating margin and capital requirements.
The reported financing provides one dated anchor. A move from the $965 billion Series H post-money valuation to $2 trillion would be a little more than a doubling before accounting for any new shares sold in the IPO. That re-rating would require either much higher future cash flows, a lower required return or both. Without the share count and use of proceeds, even a precise headline valuation cannot be converted into a reliable per-share value.
What must be true for the valuation to work
Anthropic would need sustained enterprise demand, pricing power and enough product differentiation to offset declining model costs and open-source competition. It would also need to show that revenue growth can outrun the cost of training, inference, compute commitments and talent. Contract duration, customer concentration and dependence on cloud partners would be central to that analysis.
The bearish research has its own limits. New Constructs made similarly skeptical calls on WeWork and Allbirds, which later suffered severe value destruction, but it also attacked DoorDash before that company built a far larger public-market value. A dramatic label is not evidence that the same outcome will repeat.
For investors, the correct posture is wait for the filing. A public prospectus should clarify audited periods, related-party arrangements, compute obligations, stock compensation, cash burn, customer concentration and the exact number of shares and proceeds. Until then, both the $2 trillion target and the $150 billion countervalue are scenarios built on incomplete information rather than investable facts.