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Investors are questioning whether Anthropic can sustain its extraordinary growth as competition, price-sensitive customers and the potential for AI to destroy humanity cloud its blockbuster IPO.
The company’s annualised revenue soared to $65bn in July and its backers forecast it will exceed $120bn by year-end, making Anthropic the fastest-growing business of all time.
But considerable uncertainty remains over whether it can sustain that pace, reflected in the wide range of IPO valuations estimated by investors familiar with the group’s performance.
Anthropic, valued today at $965bn, could trade at between $1.5tn and $4tn after it listed, they said — a range roughly equivalent to the market capitalisation of Amazon.
“It’s amazing, we’re at $100bn net revenue between [OpenAI and Anthropic] but it’s still too early to know how it pans out,” said Joey Brookhart, an analyst covering AI labs at SemiAnalysis.
Among the concerns for prospective investors is the resurgence of Anthropic’s chief rival, OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker has attracted a growing share of customer spending since releasing GPT 5.6 in July, overtaking Anthropic in weekly spend for the first time in more than two and a half years, according to data from model platform OpenRouter.
OpenAI now claims to have the best available model in Astra, released earlier this month. The company has delayed its own IPO and is in early talks with investors to raise fresh funding at a $1.2tn valuation.
Both companies face a looming threat from “open” models, AI software whose parameters are publicly available and can be customised.
These cheaper models, primarily produced today by Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Moonshot and tech giants such as Meta, are approaching performance levels of more sophisticated “closed” frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic and gaining market share.
“This is the first time we’re seeing real price competition between the labs,” said Eric Glyman, co-founder and co-chief executive of corporate payments company Ramp.
Ramp and many of its customers switched between rival models depending on the task, using routers that make it easier to change providers and harder for labs to lock in customers, he added. The company had slashed AI spend by 40 per cent as a result.
“You don’t need to rent a Ferrari to go pick up your groceries,” said Glyman. The change in usage patterns, he added, begged the question: “Have we reached intelligence saturation?”
Executives including Microsoft boss Satya Nadella have long argued that AI models will become “commoditised” as competition drives down prices and users opt for the best-value model.
Anthropic has been better at retaining customers than rivals. Aleh Tsyvinski, an economics professor at Yale who has analysed data from OpenRouter, found 22.5 per cent of Anthropic users are still using its models 12 months after first use, compared with around 13.2 per cent for OpenAI.
Anthropic declined to comment.
Bullish investors argue that both of America’s two leading labs will thrive as demand for AI grows. OpenAI and Anthropic are growing prodigiously, with usage of tokens, the units of data which comprise AI queries, expanding by 250 times since the start of last year, according to OpenRouter.
The companies have been adept at finding new sources of growth since the release of the ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022 and now hope to extend the boom by pushing the frontier of research and honing their products.
“If AI works and has a business model, Anthropic will be at the centre of it,” said Mike Paulus, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner whose family office backs the company.
However, “it’s an open question [if AI works, and] it will be a battle in every market: OpenAI will be there, incumbents will be there and open-weight models will be there. It’s not a cosy monopoly,” he added.
That competition has raised a broader question over whether frontier AI can replicate the economics of earlier highly profitable software companies.
Investors are also scrutinising how concentrated Anthropic’s revenues are among its largest customers and cloud partners and weighing the risks of intervention by the Trump administration.
Another fear is that advances in AI trigger a social crisis. Jacob Coxon, a departing Anthropic researcher, said this month that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.
Anthropic chief Dario Amodei has since called for AI labs to slow the development of cutting-edge systems to ensure they are safe. That could save Anthropic tens of billions in training costs but give rivals, particularly in China, more time to close the technological gap.
“The CEOs [of the labs] are saying ‘we should slow down and take care,’ the market is saying ‘yeah . . . but the profit motive is overwhelming’,” said Paulus, the investor. “We may look back and wonder why we didn’t take them at their word.”
Data visualisation by Clara Murray. Additional reporting by Rafe Rosner-Uddin and Cristina Criddle