Anthropic ARR sparks valuation controversy: behind $65 billion in annualized revenue, the market is questioning AI's growth slope

Comparing news, Anthropic's revenue growth is still entering the capital market at an accelerated pace, but controversy surrounding its valuation is also heating up.

Bloomberg previously reported that Anthropic had an annualized revenue operating rate of around $65 billion as of the end of July. This figure is still astonishing on the surface, but the focus of market discussions has turned to another level: whether $65 billion means that the growth slope is slowing against the backdrop of some third-party data and optimistic expectations in the AI community pointing at more than $80 billion.

The controversy first stemmed from the ARR caliber. ARR, or annual recurring revenue, essentially annualizes the current revenue rate and is not equivalent to audited annual revenue. According to Sacra data, Anthropic's annualized revenue in May was about 47 billion US dollars and rose to 65 billion US dollars in July, but it also warned that revenue from cloud channels such as AWS, Google, and Microsoft may be confirmed in terms of total volume, which will make the scale of revenue seem larger and will also raise the market's focus on gross margin and revenue quality.

Optimists still believe that this number is sufficient proof of the strong demand for AI in enterprises. Gavin Baker of Atreides Management believes that Anthropic has had an advantage over OpenAI in terms of token efficiency; PitchBook's Harrison Rolfes points out that even if the model price is higher, if the task success rate is higher, enterprise customers may still accept a higher unit price. In other words, what many people value is not simply the size of API calls, but Claude's ability to pay in the enterprise workflow.

Cautists, on the other hand, believe that the market will need to wait for the IPO prospectus to be verified. Simon Willison previously pointed out that run-rate revenue usually comes from short-term annualization of income and cannot be directly regarded as full-year accounting revenue. ThinkFast's Ken Koo also warned that what really matters will be the audit revenue, gross profit margin, customer concentration, computing power procurement obligations, and cash flow in the S-1 file. Ed Zitron more directly questioned that AI companies' ARR may be affected by fluctuations in prepaid tokens, cloud channel revenue, and short-term usage.

This discussion is no longer just about Anthropic's valuation. Steve Eisman previously referred to OpenAI and Anthropic as key risk points in AI transactions because capital expenses and cloud revenue expectations of tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle are increasingly tied to leading AI labs.