There's a world where capabilities narrow and Anthropic is stuck selling a commodity (not like they don't have any competition now). In this world it's not unbelievable that Anthropic would trade around or below 1x revenue no?
I think calling Anthropic a tech company could be like calling an electric utility a tech company.
The $2T comes from the implied odds (perhaps 10 or 20%) that we get near term AGI or RSI and AI becomes the entire economy, crossed with the odds that Anthropic gets there first and is the runaway winner (maybe 25%).
The trouble, in my view, is that today's revenue numbers are essentially irrelevant to the outcome that drives ~all of the expected value. The market has been pretending otherwise, but fundamentally we're looking at a globally top-10 public company that boils down to a binary call option, and the probability underlying that option is inscrutable. That's never happened before, and an inability to divine a fair valuation properly demands extreme volatility, especially in reaction to capabilities progress.
Finally (total speculation): I think Anthropic knows this. I think they're sitting on something with Fable 5.5 and the surprise outperformance of Opus 5.5 is a tell. They intend to release it just before the IPO and make some big claims underwritten by its performance.
At this point every churches should IPO and raise hundreds of billions from the implied odds that judgment day is near and Paradise becomes the entire economy, that wouldn't be crazier.
Anthropic simply has a better claim, better PR, more testimonies, better prophets :)
most people have been already inoculated against that kind of doomsday predictions
(and also because of this there's a huge problem with solving slow moving diasters, like climate change)
Where have you seen a trillion dollar IPO from a cult?
In addition to:
> the probability underlying that option is inscrutable
The "positive" side outcomes are also pretty inscrutable imo: even if AI completely replaced labour, how does it trade against natural resources? Even if anthropic gets there first, might open weights arrive a few months later? If AI drives the value of labour to cents per hour, does that crater global demand?
For sure, the "anthropic stock is a ticket to heaven" scenario is in there somewhere, but even taking complete AGI victory as a given, it seems like a very narrow outcome.
On the third hand: if AGI victory is assumed, even if Anthropic isn't a great bet even under that assumption, where else to put your money? While the music plays, you have to dance.
FWIW Bitcoin had the same dynamics. Its valuation between 2011-2021 basically derived from a superposition of two futures: one in which it took over the entire global economy and became the dominant reserve currency, and one in which it failed and its value went to zero. The middle-ground was effectively excluded because currencies have strong network effects and a currency that is not dominant within a market quickly ends up unacceptable to merchants and worthless.
It's still somewhat in that grey zone, used as a form of digital gold by people who believe that the dominant reserve currency (USD) is going to zero as well as a trading medium by rogue nations, but its performance has been lackluster since 2021. It's currently up about 20% since then.
Entirely possible that AI follows a similar trajectory. People assume that it's either going to go bust or take over the economy, but people are really good at overlooking excluded middle grounds. Personally I think it'll settle into a space where it's very effective as a coding assistant, effective at creating propaganda and fake forum posts, and has the effect of killing Google Search (but not really replacing it), but doesn't fulfill all the hype around completely replacing the economy.