Independent research firm New Constructs published a report on October 6 calling Anthropic's upcoming IPO "the most ridiculous IPO of 2026." Using a discounted cash flow model, the firm's bear-case scenario puts Anthropic's equity value at just $144 billion — 93% below the roughly $2 trillion valuation the report says Anthropic is targeting for its public offering.
The report was written by Kyle Guske II, a senior analyst at the firm. His financial figures come from what he describes as a "leaked" prospectus; Anthropic has not yet filed a formal registration statement and has not responded to the report.
What the numbers in the report say
According to the figures cited in the report, Anthropic generated roughly $4.6 billion in revenue in 2025 and about $400 million in 2024. Net losses totaled $42 billion, of which $34 billion was a non-cash charge tied to the revaluation of convertible instruments. Stripping that out, the company's after-tax operating loss widened from roughly $3 billion in 2024 to $8 billion. Cash on hand stood at about $20.3 billion.
The biggest red flag, in the report's view, is contractual commitments. It says Anthropic has signed roughly $518 billion in cloud, compute and infrastructure obligations, about 80% of them non-cancelable — more than 100 times 2025 revenue. Revenue concentration is flagged separately: the top two customers account for about 25% of revenue, and roughly 47% of revenue flows through Google's and Amazon's cloud platforms, both of which are also Anthropic investors and compute suppliers.
"the purpose of this IPO is to create exit liquidity for private equity and Wall Street insiders not wealth for public market investors"
How the three scenarios were built
New Constructs used a weighted average cost of capital of 9.33%, the average for Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Oracle. All three scenarios assume revenue grows tenfold in 2026 and doubles again in 2027; they diverge after that on growth rate and margins:
| Scenario | 2028-2035 growth rate | 2035 revenue | Equity value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base case | 56% | ~$3.6 trillion | ~$2 trillion |
| Scenario two | 36% | ~$1.2 trillion | ~$1.1 trillion |
| Scenario three | 20% | ~$447 billion | ~$144 billion |
To justify the $2 trillion figure, 2035 revenue would need to reach 1.4 times the combined trailing-12-month revenue of those seven companies — a premise the report argues doesn't hold up. It also points to pricing power: the report claims the token costs of Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 run 18 to 23 times higher than DeepSeek R1's, for similar or worse performance. The report doesn't fully spell out how that comparison was made, so it should be read with caution.
Lining up against other pre-IPO companies
The report places Anthropic alongside several companies that were losing money before going public. In the year before their IPOs, Uber's operating loss was about $3 billion, Rivian's about $1 billion, and Airbnb's about $500 million; Anthropic's is $8 billion. On the private funding side, Uber raised about $24 billion before its IPO, while Anthropic has raised roughly $122 billion — five times as much.
Those companies' paths diverged widely afterward. Uber lost money for years after its IPO before turning profitable, and Rivian's stock is still trading well below its offering price. New Constructs has published similarly bearish reports on other high-profile IPOs in the past; this one reads more like a risk checklist than something investors should use to price the stock.
One more number points in the opposite direction: the report itself cites The New York Times saying Anthropic's annualized revenue could approach $100 billion this year. If that figure holds, the 2025 base of $4.6 billion is already far behind, and the starting point for all three scenarios would need to be recalculated. The report mentions this in a single sentence without using it to revise the model.
Sources: New Constructs research report, CocoLoop, The New York Times. The valuation table reflects the growth rates, revenue and equity values from the three scenarios as cited in the report; all financial figures follow the prospectus basis the report cites.