BREAKINGVIEWS-Anthropic at $380 bln is a cheap AI nirvana

By Karen Kwok

LONDON, Feb 13 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Artificial intelligence is both unbeatable and unsustainable. At least, that’s the apparent contradiction animating public markets, roiled in recent days by a chatbot-inspired selloff. If language models like Anthropic-developed Claude really can devour incumbent software providers, then the company’s now-$380 billion valuation, if anything, looks cheap. That’s only if it overcomes worries cropping up elsewhere about overheated spending, though, while growing at incredible speed.

Led by former OpenAI researcher Dario Amodei, Anthropic on Thursday announced a new $30 billion funding round at a valuation double what it fetched just five months ago. That sounds frothy. Yet if investors take the company’s astonishing revenue-growth projections at face value, it’s nearly reasonable.

According to The Information, Anthropic is forecasting between $82 billion and $102 billion in revenue by 2028. In a best-case scenario, that puts its valuation at a 3.7-times revenue multiple, well below chip giant Nvidia NVDA.O at nearly 9 times or Google owner Alphabet’s GOOGL.O 6 times, based on Visible Alpha data. Perhaps more importantly, it’s also below software firms that have seen their shares sink recently, like Snowflake SNOW.N or ServiceNow NOW.N.

That’s important because they’re selling off, in no small part, thanks to incredible advances in programming assistants like Anthropic’s Claude Code. A new plugin, released last week, aims to broaden its usability. The launch spooked markets, helping to fuel to what turned into a $1 trillion tumble in technology stocks.

It is, of course, taking a lot on faith to assume that Anthropic will be able to gain all of that lost value. Granted, the company’s annualized revenue has jumped by an order of magnitude in each of the last three years, while subscriptions driven by Claude Code quadrupled since the start of 2026. Yet that left Anthropic at $14 billion in recurring sales today, a far cry from its medium-term targets.

Moreover, 81% of enterprise customers surveyed by venture capital firm a16z also use three or more models in production or testing. Data from financial technology company Ramp AI shows16% of businesses now pay for both OpenAI and Anthropic, up from 8% last year. Customers have not yet picked one definitive winner.

AI labs also remain deeply unprofitable, while driving enormous spending on server farms to train models and handle user queries. Public markets are also nervous about this spending binge, with Microsoft MSFT.O and Oracle ORCL.N shares wavering amid uncertainty over their vast commitments. Amodei, at least, has not unveiled the grandiose data-center-building plans of OpenAI boss Sam Altman, perhaps making his company a simpler bet. That’s only if he can write the future faster than it gets rewritten.

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CONTEXT NEWS

Anthropic has raised $30 billion in its latest funding round, more than doubling the Claude chatbot maker's post-money valuation to $380 billion.

The funding round, announced on February 12, was co-led by investors including D. E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ and MGX. It also included a portion of previously announced investments from Microsoft and Nvidia.

The company previously raised $13 billion in a Series F round at a valuation of $183 billion, it said in early September last year.