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points by bryanlarsen 1 day ago | 0 comments

Anthropic's original $2T valuation implies they are going to almost 100X their revenue.

I am highly confident that Anthropic will 100X their token sales volume. I am also confident that token prices will continue dropping through the floor due to competition. So to 100X their revenue they will have to 1000X or 10000X their token sales. That seems a stretch.

[–] superchicken099 1 day ago

As AI grows in capability it will be trusted to do more of the work it already does and also break into new fields. Also, there are many who have never interacted with a chatbot. There is an entire world of potential customers out there. It can be quite a villainous business model but look at what Facebook did in Africa with their sponsored ISP and also what they’re doing with Meta Muse. Demand for AI usage will skyrocket.

[–] rhdunn 1 day ago

Chatbots aren't a money maker. Each interaction is likely to be 1-2K tokens at most. AWS Bedrock prices 11K token input and 4K output for a total of $0.184 using on-demand usage [1]. So for normal usage (occasionally asking questions) you are looking at less than $1 per month for a person.

Using the models for data processing (a lot of input/output tokens) and for role-playing will use more tokens and thus cost more. However, those use cases are not common when comparing the percentage of the user base.

The money maker is agentic coding where people get the models to perform long-running tasks. This is why Open AI and Anthropic have been pushing these hard. However, there is pushback on this, especially among businesses looking for value for money/cut costs [2] like Apple [3], [4].

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/

[2] https://www.ibm.com/think/insights/tokenmaxxing-dead-long-li...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-11-04/apple-cut...

[4] https://9to5mac.com/2026/11/04/report-apple-reduces-employee...

[–] SkiFire13 1 day ago

> As AI grows in capability

The issue is, at some point for AI to grow more in usage it will need to decrease in cost.

We are already seeing this with some companies reducing AI usage or moving to open models due to high costs.

AI will surely boom there's no doubt on that, but it won't necessarily produce the revenue that Anthropic investors hope for.

[–] jatora 1 day ago

3 companies have moved.

[–] lbreakjai 1 day ago

There's an entire universe of companies outside the MAG7 or VC-backed startups. I used to work for a US company, employing 60.000 people worldwide, which made the switch. But you will never hear about it because it's not a "tech" company.

[–] verdverm 1 day ago

open weight models wouldn't be processing more tokens if that were true

many companies are now using both, it's only been a few months since it really picked up

[–] SkiFire13 20 hours ago

And hopefully they will show that having faster and unlimited tokens at 10x cheaper costs will be a winning move.

[–] falserum 1 day ago

Depends on the price.

Do we know if current pricing is sustainable?

[–] gamblor956 1 day ago

Also, there are many who have never interacted with a chatbot.

Something like 99% of the people who have interacted with an LLM chatbot lose interest after a month.

100% of people who have to interact with an LLM chatbot taking the place of a human customer sales or service agent jump to a competitor.

Outside of the tech bubble, the LLM hype is already over.

[–] famouswaffles 1 day ago

>Something like 99% of the people who have interacted with an LLM chatbot lose interest after a month.

This is not remotely true. It literally couldn't be true, considering Open AI have 1.2 Billion weekly active ChatGPT users.

[–] akkad33 1 day ago

I use Gemini instead of Google most of the time and I think most people now go to chatgpt or gemini for things they used to Google.

[–] bryanlarsen 1 day ago

But will it increase by 10000X, as I back of the envelope calculated it would require to justify Anthropic's $2T valuation in the face of quickly dropping token prices?

[–] handfuloflight 1 day ago

It only needs to increase just enough to keep the forward looking carrot to be continued to be dangled.

[–] fallingbananna 1 day ago

To be fair, when I buy stocks, I care less whether the company is worth 1 million, 1 billion or 1 trillion at the time I buy.

I care about whether it's going to grow in value/price from that point on or not.

And it's hard for me to imagine it growing even higher than the current valuation.

[–] WarmWash 1 day ago

If datacenters hit significant headwinds, it will drive token prices up as more people start offloading work onto LLMs.

However this effect could just serve to make those who own the compute ridiculous money, while crushing those who need to lease compute.

[–] qlte 1 day ago

Or incentivize using the minimum viable model for the job instead of throwing multi trillion parameter Fable sized models at summarizing documents or classification tasks.

I now do like 90% of my routine software dev/sysadmin stuff with Luna on Medium by default, some proportion of which could itself be offloaded to a small Qwen model.

[–] weakfish 1 day ago

But I wonder if that offloading will happen if prices rise past a certain point and it becomes not worth it.

[–] gamblor956 1 day ago

Economic theory would state that if token prices go up people will stop offloading work onto LLMs and start doing it themselves again.

Indeed, 2026 was basically that: the LLM providers increased token costs and companies cut LLM spend to the bone. That is why Anthropic's IPO is struggling and MS and Google have failed to meet AI-related revenue targets for 3 straight years.