NYU professor Aswath Damodaran ("Dean of Valuation"), published a long blog and says Anthropic’s IPO will be priced on run-rate revenue rather than valued on cash flows.

> Justifying a $1.5T to $2T value for Anthropic requires very fast early growth, operating margins rising to 30% or more, compute costs growing slower than revenue, and risk falling to average as regulation and business models settle.

> H1 2026 losses of $8.7B at Anthropic and $21.6B at OpenAI, excluding non-cash charges, rule out earnings multiples, making ARR the AI equivalent of dot-com eyeballs and social-media user counts.

> ARR has no standard: OpenAI’s $50B counts partner sales net, Anthropic’s $65B counts them gross, and grossing up OpenAI produced the roughly $70B figure investors circulated. Both annualize monthly, a choice either can change.

> VC rounds here price the IPO rather than value the business: Anthropic’s May round raised $65B at $965B post-money when expected IPO pricing was $1.15T, a haircut for delay or disappointment.

> Pricing will likely migrate to 2030 or 2036 revenue and earnings, where 25 times 2036 earnings looks cheap only when wrongly compared with today’s multiples on current earnings.

> The cheaper lab depends on the yardstick: at $1.5T to $2T, Anthropic looks cheaper on current and year-end ARR, OpenAI on 2030 revenue, compute and users, and both may simply be overpriced.

> No listed pure-play peer exists, since Gemini sits inside Alphabet, xAI inside SpaceX and Muse inside Meta, so Anthropic will be priced against OpenAI’s private rounds or the Mag 7 and SpaceX.