The total market cap has reached $1 trillion, so how should we calculate Anthropic's valuation?

TL;DR

· After Smartplus's stock price reassessment, the market extrapolated a $10 trillion valuation for Anthropic, but the two have different revenue bases and scarcity premiums.

· The Binance Anthropic Pre-IPO perpetual contract, based on 1 billion shares, currently implies a total market value of around $1.7 trillion, but it still does not equate to the true exit price of common stock.

· Related topics: Anthropic, Smartplus, Amazon, Google, AI private asset trading platform, RWA/tokenized stocks sector.

Domestically, large-scale AI models have been the absolute focus of the capital market in recent days. After several days of uninterrupted gains, it just hit a HK$1 trillion milestone on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The commercialization path of Smartplus is entirely benchmarked against Anthropic, as CEO Zhang Peng mentioned. Just a few months ago, Anthropic completed a $65 billion financing round, with a post-money valuation of around $965 billion.

So, after a few months, can we calculate how much Anthropic is worth through the meteoric rise of Smartplus?

Let's Use PS to Calculate First

According to SCMP, Smartplus's 2025 revenue is 7.2433 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 131.9%, with a total loss of 4.72 billion RMB, and an adjusted net loss of 3.18 billion RMB. It is still in a phase of low revenue base and high losses. The significant revaluation of the stock price and market value in 2026 trades not only the current income statement but also the advancement of domestic large-scale model capabilities, along with substitute imaginations brought by Claude Fable and Mythos' overseas model access restrictions, the scarcity of Hong Kong AI targets, and the amplification of popular assets by the public market's liquidity.

Calculating based on Smartplus's approximately $100 million revenue in 2025, its market value corresponded to hundreds of times PS at one point. This multiple has far exceeded that of traditional high-growth software companies and surpassed the valuation framework most mature tech stocks can withstand.

Apply this multiple to Anthropic.

If calculated based on Anthropic's annualized revenue growth of over $30 billion to $47 billion, a theoretical valuation corresponding to hundreds of times revenue would enter the trillion-dollar range, well above the price indicated by current private market financing.

But a trillion dollars is clearly a distortion.

On-chain Pre-IPO Pricing and Equity Misalignment

On-chain Pre-IPO assets are provided by platforms in token form to offer a tradable entry point. Currently, the most well-known exchange for Anthropic's Pre-IPO assets is Binance.

When Binance Futures launched the ANTHROPICUSDT contract on June 2, it was disclosed that the contract utilized a share count of 1 billion and expressly stated that this share count is only a reference and does not represent the actual post-IPO share count, nor does it constitute Binance's endorsement of the implied valuation.

Based on the latest market price as of June 22, ANTHROPIC is trading at approximately 1718 USDT. With an estimated share count of 1 billion shares used by the platform, a rough calculation shows that the on-chain contract price corresponds to an implied total market capitalization of about $1.72 trillion for Anthropic. However, liquidity is very poor, with only $1 million in trading volume over 24 hours.

Anthropic's Anchor in Revenue Velocity and Cost Curve

Apart from the $10 trillion calculated using PS and the $1.72 trillion estimated due to low liquidity, are there any other methods?

For example, identifying the two critical variables for an AI company: whether revenue can sustain high growth and whether costs can continuously decrease.

Traditional software companies often use revenue multiples for pricing because of their low marginal costs. Selling software to the millionth customer does not incur a significant additional cost. However, this is different for large AI companies. Each time a user calls the model, it consumes computational power, electricity, chip depreciation, and cloud resources, which constitute the inference cost (the cost of using the model).

If the inference cost does not decrease rapidly enough, the higher the revenue, the higher the burn rate could be. This is why Anthropic's Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and gross margin are more critical than just revenue. ARR is not the audited revenue for the whole year but rather the revenue from the most recent month or quarter annualized to observe the company's current commercialization pace.

A valuation can start with a simple formula: Anthropic ARR multiplied by a revenue multiple, then adjusted based on gross margin and cloud costs with a discount or premium.

Looking only at the IPO window, the core variable is how much ARR Anthropic can achieve before going public. Overseas buyers' mainstream expectations for Anthropic + OpenAI's combined ARR by the end of 2026 range from $140 billion to over $200 billion. If Anthropic maintains its current approximately 59% revenue share, its corresponding ARR would be around $82 billion to $118 billion. At 10 times ARR, this corresponds to over $820 billion to $1.18 trillion; at 15 times, it corresponds to over $1.23 trillion to $1.77 trillion; at 20 times, it corresponds to over $1.64 trillion to $2.36 trillion.

This is currently Anthropic's relatively reliable valuation algorithm.

The market is willing to give Anthropic a near trillion-dollar private valuation, essentially betting on three things happening at the same time: continued growth in enterprise and developer demand for Claude, the ability for scenarios like Agent and Code Assistant to generate high-quality revenue, and a rapid decrease in inference costs, allowing the gross margin to approach that of early-stage software companies.

None of the Three Anchors Is the Answer

So, going back to the initial question, Metaverse, Pre-IPO, and ARR multiples, all three methods can calculate a number, but none can stand alone as the answer.

The Metaverse approach provides an emotional cap. It illustrates that the market is willing to pay a high premium for scarce AI assets, but applying it directly to Anthropic would result in a clearly distorted figure in the trillions of dollars.

Binance provides a trading price. $1.72 trillion seems closer to reality, but it corresponds to illiquid Pre-IPO contracts, not the true clearing price of common stock.

The ARR multiple is relatively more reliable, but it is still a framework. Whether Anthropic's valuation after going public can hold up ultimately depends on whether several conditions can simultaneously materialize: revenue continues to grow rapidly, enterprise and developer demand transitions into stable repeat purchases, Agent and Code Assistant bring in high-quality revenue, and the decline in inference costs and cloud costs is rapid enough.

If all these conditions materialize simultaneously, a valuation close to or even exceeding a trillion dollars is supported. If any of these conditions falter, the market will reassess Anthropic's value, rather than continue to believe in a single attractive valuation anchor.

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