Finance professor Aswath Damodaran values Anthropic IPO below its proposed range, warns of governance risks

Professor Aswath Damodaran, a corporate-finance specialist at New York University, valued artificial-intelligence firm Anthropic at $1.475 trillion, slightly under the lower end of the company’s stated IPO pricing range of $1.5-$2 trillion. He said the estimate reflects an optimistic scenario in which Anthropic’s annual revenue could near $1 trillion by 2036 with an operating profit margin of 27.5 percent after regulatory impacts.

Damodaran cautioned investors about the firm’s share-voting structure, noting that Anthropic operates as a public-benefit corporation with multiple share classes that give founders substantial control. > "As an potential investor in Anthropic, keep in mind its status as a public benefit corporation, with you as one of many stakeholders, and a share voting structure that would put Kim Jong Un to shame in entrenching founders," he wrote on X.

He also pointed to the massive cost of computing infrastructure, citing more than $600 billion in related commitments, and warned that competition from rivals such as OpenAI and cheaper open-source models could slow growth. While Anthropic’s revenue in the first two quarters of 2026 was about 14 times that of the same period a year earlier and the number of enterprise customers spending over $1 million annually on its Claude models rose to 1,900, the company posted an operating loss of over $8 billion for the first half of 2026 after adjustments.

Damodaran said investors should test whether their assumptions about Anthropic’s future are merely possible, plausible or probable, and suggested waiting for the final IPO pricing before committing capital. He likened the prospectus to a kindergarten report card, implying that high expectations do not automatically translate into a justified investment price.