--- title: Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test... description: Independent research firm New Constructs has labeled Anthropic's upcoming Nasdaq IPO the 'most ridiculous IPO of 2026,' valuing the AI company at just $150... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/research-firm-calls-anthropic-s-ipo-unprecedented-test-of-investor-gullibity--drtgdbmnr twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity' | daily.dev og:description: Independent research firm New Constructs has labeled Anthropic's upcoming Nasdaq IPO the 'most ridiculous IPO of 2026,' valuing the AI company at just $150... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/research-firm-calls-anthropic-s-ipo-unprecedented-test-of-investor-gullibity--drtgdbmnr og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/DrtgDbMnR.png og:image:alt: Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity' og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity' **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Independent research firm New Constructs has labeled Anthropic's upcoming Nasdaq IPO the 'most ridiculous IPO of 2026,' valuing the AI company at just $150 billion versus the roughly $2 trillion market cap it is reportedly targeting. The firm argues Anthropic lacks a viable business given $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue against a $42 billion net loss, and notes mounting competition from open-source models. New Constructs founder David Trainer previously made the same 'most ridiculous IPO' call against WeWork (which later went bankrupt) and Allbirds (which sold its assets for a fraction of its IPO valuation), but was wrong about DoorDash, which has thrived since its 2020 debut. Anthropic has not yet made its prospectus public and did not respond to a request for comment. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How much revenue and losses did Anthropic report for 2025 according to its leaked IPO prospectus? Anthropic reportedly generated $4.6 billion in revenue in 2025 while recording a net loss of $42 billion, according to a leaked copy of the company's IPO prospectus cited by Reuters. Separately, Anthropic said its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion by the end of July 2026, up sevenfold year-over-year, and the New York Times reported it was on pace for $100 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026. _Investors weighing Anthropic's IPO can follow financial updates and market analysis like this on daily.dev._ ### Why is New Constructs calling Anthropic's IPO the most ridiculous of the year? New Constructs values Anthropic at only $150 billion versus a rumored $2 trillion IPO target, arguing the company would need double Nvidia's trailing annual profit (over $190 billion) to justify that valuation. The firm cites Anthropic's $42 billion net loss against $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue, rising open-source model competition, and existential AI risk disclosures as reasons it believes Anthropic lacks a viable business. _Developers tracking AI vendor stability and funding can follow analyses like this one on daily.dev._ ### Has the analyst who called Anthropic's IPO ridiculous been right before about other IPOs like WeWork or DoorDash? David Trainer's firm New Constructs correctly called WeWork the 'most ridiculous IPO of 2019' before WeWork pulled its offering and later filed for bankruptcy in 2023, and it was also bearish on Allbirds, which later sold its assets for about $39 million. However, the firm was wrong about DoorDash, which it labeled 'most ridiculous' in 2020 but which has since grown to an $83 billion market cap. _Those evaluating AI vendor risk can weigh track records like this through coverage on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 117 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-12). **TL;DR:** Most commenters view the reported $2T target valuation as disconnected from Anthropic's financials and competitive moat, though a vocal minority argues growth trajectory and product stickiness could justify a lower-but-still-huge valuation. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 30% mixed · 55% skeptical **The case for** - Revenue has grown extremely fast (from near-zero to billions), which some see as justifying continued optimism. - Claude/Claude Code is seen by some as the best coding tool today with genuine enterprise stickiness that's hard to replicate quickly. - Inference margins are reportedly already high in isolation, separate from training costs. **The pushback** - Open-source and Chinese open-weight models are rapidly closing the capability gap, undermining any 'frontier' moat. - The business looks structurally similar to WeWork — an important but ultimately low-multiple business being sold as a world-changing one. - Heavy and perpetual reinvestment in next-gen training means profitability may never catch up to the valuation. - New Constructs itself has a poor track record, having wrongly called 'most ridiculous IPO' on many since-successful companies like Uber, CrowdStrike, and Palantir. - Model capability advantages are commoditized quickly since companies can route tasks to cheaper, interchangeable models on demand. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Discussion leans heavily critical of the valuation and business model, with pushback noting the research firm's own poor forecasting record, plus a long tangent on moats, inference economics, and whether frontier capability is monetizable. **Hottest debate:** Whether Anthropic's inference economics and 'frontier' lead constitute a real moat worth trillions, or whether open-source/Chinese models and model-routing will commoditize it away. **Open questions** - Can Anthropic sustain premium pricing once cheaper open-weight models close the capability gap? - Is the reported revenue growth genuine demand or partly circular/hype-driven dealing? - What happens to the valuation once the actual S-1 prospectus (rather than leaked figures) is released? **Highlights** > New Constructs is bearish on every tech IPO. Easy to reinforce your bias by selectively looking at instances where they were right, like WeWork, but they also predicted failed IPOs for Spotify (+219%), Uber (+60%), CrowdStrike (+3136%), Cloudflare (+2306%), Palantir (+1991%), Snowflake (+51%), DoorDash (+93%), Robinhood (+187%), ARM (+422%), Instacart (+59%), Reddit (+370%), CoreWeave (+105%), SpaceX (+20%) and lots more. So whatever your stance on Anthropic this particular analysis is safe to ignore. > — [binlog on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50053978) > Except that’s simply not how it works. Companies just have one forklift. Yes it’s too much for most use cases but you don’t have a garage full of different sized forklifts. There’s a big cost to keeping all these extra forklifts on standby. Models, however, are completely interchangeable on demand. That’s why companies are building these realtime internal marketplaces to route tokens to different models. Anthropic may win the occasional “bleeding edge” use case but the money is in the day to day use cases that get routed to the cheap-but-works options. There’s zero cost to having all the forklift sizes at your disposal and only using the size needed when it’s truly needed. Anthropic is trying to sell the biggest baddest forklift in a world where companies can swap out cheaper ones easily and on demand. Hence why Anthropic doesn’t appear to have a viable business model in its current form. > — [cmiles8 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054098) > Yes, they have the same problem WeWork had on the multiple front. Coworking was a thing long before WeWork was a thing. It’s an important but boring business that trades at low multiples. WeWork tried to IPO on the basis that somehow it was worth vastly more, but the market woke up and realized it’s just subleasing office space. The same is unfolding with Anthropic. It’s doing important work but everyone is realizing it’s not got a serious edge over anyone else. It’s important but ultimately a boring business. It’s still likely worth a few hundred billion, which is massively impressive for any startup, but trillions is pipe dream. > — [cmiles8 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054808) > $2 trillion is a lot of money and certainly doesn’t seem a safe bet at that price. But also, their revenue went from <$0 in 2024 to $4b in 2025 to what will likely be >15x that in 2026. Has anything ever grown that fast before? If you carry that forward even one year, and I’m not saying you certainly can, they’re outselling NVIDIA. I get it, there are risks, scalability issues, low cost competitors, etc. $2 trillion is a big number, but it’s tiny compared to all human payroll. I’m not buying it either but I dont think anyone who does failed an IQ test. > — [mattmaroon on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50055812) > The model is engine, the harness is the car Anthropic are selling. They are a service company, selling home-grown, mass-produced, conveniently packaged intelligence at a well established price for consumer. Their API pricing might just be for value proposition and tax deduction purposes. Every tech company, tech department, startup that I know is using claude code to deliver. The boutique deepseeks, qwens, glms and kimis are nice, but ain't production ready in 98% of cases. All the pi's, opencodes, etc are nice, but much less enterprise friendly. And google just outright sucks in comparison. There's a use case for each, but not at the scale Anthropic is doing. Only real competition - OpenAI - is close, but they're burning money to stay there, which imo is unsustainable long term. Is Anthropic worth $2T? Can't say. But boy they have a good opportunity to test this, and they may not have a similar chance in the future. I think they have a fair chance at this. > — [wwizo on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50053669) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50051583) · 161 points · 117 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49999891) · 2 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Anthropic raises $65 Billion, nears $1T valuation ahead of IPO](https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-raises-65-billion-nears-1t-valuation-ahead-of-ipo-sgkrla5x1) · TechCrunch · 10 upvotes · 4 comments - [Anthropic eyes a $900b valuation in a potential $50b round](https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-eyes-a-900b-valuation-in-a-potential-50b-round-7z63n5bpl) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 1 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#nvidia](https://daily.dev/tags/nvidia), [#anthropic](https://daily.dev/tags/anthropic), [#ipo](https://daily.dev/tags/ipo) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/research-firm-calls-anthropic-s-ipo-unprecedented-test-of-investor-gullibity--drtgdbmnr) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity'","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/research-firm-calls-anthropic-s-ipo-unprecedented-test-of-investor-gullibity--drtgdbmnr","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/research-firm-calls-anthropic-s-ipo-unprecedented-test-of-investor-gullibity--drtgdbmnr"},"datePublished":"2026-10-12T09:34:24.727Z","dateModified":"2026-10-12T13:20:43.373Z","description":"Independent research firm New Constructs has labeled Anthropic's upcoming Nasdaq IPO the 'most ridiculous IPO of 2026,' valuing the AI company at just $150...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/2f714da79b22602bbd775ad298735dfb?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/2f714da79b22602bbd775ad298735dfb?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/research-firm-calls-anthropic-s-ipo-unprecedented-test-of-investor-gullibity--drtgdbmnr","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"ai,nvidia,anthropic,ipo","timeRequired":"PT4M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity'"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/research-firm-calls-anthropic-s-ipo-unprecedented-test-of-investor-gullibity--drtgdbmnr#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"How much revenue and losses did Anthropic report for 2025 according to its leaked IPO prospectus?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Anthropic reportedly generated $4.6 billion in revenue in 2025 while recording a net loss of $42 billion, according to a leaked copy of the company's IPO prospectus cited by Reuters. Separately, Anthropic said its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion by the end of July 2026, up sevenfold year-over-year, and the New York Times reported it was on pace for $100 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026. Investors weighing Anthropic's IPO can follow financial updates and market analysis like this on daily.dev."}},{"@type":"Question","name":"Why is New Constructs calling Anthropic's IPO the most ridiculous of the year?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"New Constructs values Anthropic at only $150 billion versus a rumored $2 trillion IPO target, arguing the company would need double Nvidia's trailing annual profit (over $190 billion) to justify that valuation. The firm cites Anthropic's $42 billion net loss against $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue, rising open-source model competition, and existential AI risk disclosures as reasons it believes Anthropic lacks a viable business. Developers tracking AI vendor stability and funding can follow analyses like this one on daily.dev."}},{"@type":"Question","name":"Has the analyst who called Anthropic's IPO ridiculous been right before about other IPOs like WeWork or DoorDash?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"David Trainer's firm New Constructs correctly called WeWork the 'most ridiculous IPO of 2019' before WeWork pulled its offering and later filed for bankruptcy in 2023, and it was also bearish on Allbirds, which later sold its assets for about $39 million. However, the firm was wrong about DoorDash, which it labeled 'most ridiculous' in 2020 but which has since grown to an $83 billion market cap. Those evaluating AI vendor risk can weigh track records like this through coverage on daily.dev."}}]} ```