#Gate直通IPO第三期Anthropic Is Anthropic expensive? Let me show you how to work it out

Everyone is calculating whether Anthropic is expensive.
The offering price is $70 to $78, with a valuation cap of $1.02 trillion. Just five weeks ago, people were talking about $2 trillion.
Two people are using the same yardstick to measure it: one says it’s not quite a bubble, while the other says the idea is extremely far-fetched.

Jack Selby, managing partner at the Thiel family office, says the idea of a trillion-dollar valuation is extremely far-fetched.
Investor Liu Yi says a price-to-sales ratio (PS) of up to 20x is acceptable, while 30x is where it starts to feel like a bubble.
Both sides are using PS: valuation divided by revenue.

You don’t need to understand profits or cash flow to use this yardstick; you can calculate it with just two numbers.
Liu Yi’s three benchmarks are: up to 20x is acceptable, a bubble starts to emerge at 30x, and 50x may already be very high.
These are an investor’s rules of thumb, not accounting standards, much less a pricing formula.

Now let’s work it out.
For the numerator, use the valuation cap of $1.02 trillion, on a basic share count basis.
For the denominator, use the prospectus’s reported first-half 2026 revenue of $16.286 billion, multiplied by 2 to annualize it to about $32.57 billion, giving a ratio of about 31x.

Now let’s look using a different denominator.
The revenue for the three months through the end of September is still redacted as ___ in the prospectus; the $16.8 billion figure came from Investor Day, not the prospectus itself.
Annualizing that by multiplying by 4 gives about $67.2 billion, resulting in a ratio of about 15x.
If the valuation is changed to $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis, the ratio is about 21x.

Same company, same yardstick: 15x falls within the acceptable range, while 31x crosses the bubble threshold. The ratio doubles simply because the denominator is based on the first half or the latest quarter.
The company is growing so fast that choosing which quarter to use as the denominator is effectively choosing a future for it.

There’s another figure that doesn’t add up: the offering price range implies a valuation of $1.02 trillion, while the market was talking about $2 trillion five weeks ago.
Same company, numerator nearly doubles.
So the better question is: how did the multiple arrive at that figure? Did revenue change, or did the multiple the market is willing to pay change?
The offering price range and proceeds are redacted in several places in the prospectus. Until the pricing is finalized, any PS ratio is a draft.

PS isn’t an answer; it’s a question: which period’s revenue are you using?

One unresolved debate to leave you with: two camps reading the same document. The bubble camp sees 80% of revenue as non-recurring and competitors only six months behind;
the ledger camp sees 11,900 large customers and NRR of about 900%.

Same numbers, opposite conclusions. Which side are you on?