{"id":498452,"date":"2026-06-13T23:44:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T23:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/498452\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T23:44:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T23:44:13","slug":"the-ai-bubble-question-is-anthropic-justified-at-1tn-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/498452\/","title":{"rendered":"The AI bubble question: is Anthropic justified at $1tn? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/spacex\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/spacex\">SpaceX\u2019s<\/a> stock market flotation has dominated headlines lately, but attention is already turning to the next trillion-dollar candidate: AI giant <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/anthropic\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/anthropic\">Anthropic<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">On the face of it, a $1 trillion Anthropic IPO looks like exactly the kind of number that screams \u201cAI bubble\u201d. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">During a funding round in March 2025, Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion. By September, that figure had tripled to $183 billion. By February 2026, it had more than doubled again, to $380 billion. By May, even that seemed modest: investors were valuing the company at $965 billion, ahead of OpenAI at roughly $852 billion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">That\u2019s a 15.7 times increase in valuation in little more than a year, and a $585 billion increase in just three months \u2013 larger than the combined value of Coca-Cola and McDonald\u2019s, to take two established American giants.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Even some of those closest to the company are uneasy about the pace of the re-rating. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">\u201cI worked so hard to get people into Anthropic at a $5 billion valuation when nobody wanted to do it,\u201d said Eric Ries, who advises Anthropic on governance, this week. \u201cAnd then I had those same people begging me for the chance to get in at $500, $800, $1 trillion at any price. I\u2019m reflexively sceptical any time people are willing to pay any price.\u201d <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">However, it is difficult to know what is more striking about Anthropic: its meteoric ascent towards $1 trillion, or the fact it no longer looks obviously excessive.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Last month, Anthropic said its annualised revenue had risen to $47 billion, from roughly $5 billion at its September 2025 funding round \u2013 \u201cmore impressive revenue growth than any company in history\u201d, as US economist Noah Smith noted recently. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Whereas SpaceX has been valued at over 90 times revenues, Anthropic\u2019s valuation suggests it is trading on around 20 times sales \u2013 not cheap, but Smith suggests it\u2019s relatively conservative for a company still growing at about 130 per cent a quarter.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The question, then, is not whether the valuation is large, but how long the underlying growth can justify it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX\u2019s stock market flotation has dominated headlines lately, but attention is already turning to the next trillion-dollar candidate:&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,3673,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-498452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}