The way Anthropic stock is being discussed these days seems almost surreal. A few weeks ago, Storm Duncan, an investment banker, advertised his Mill Valley estate, complete with four bedrooms, an infinity pool, and expansive views of the bay. He asked, quite seriously, if anyone who owned Anthropic shares prior to the company’s initial public offering (IPO) would be interested in trading. A private AI company exchanged eight million dollars’ worth of real estate in California for paper. He meant it, even though it sounds like a joke. He already has shares worth about a million dollars. All he wants is more.
That provides some insight into the current state of the market. Even though Anthropic isn’t publicly traded, it has the same impact on Wall Street as one of the bigger brands. The stock is priced by Forge at about $264 per share. It is listed closer to $1,222 by Hiive. Just the spread—two private-market platforms with drastically different numbers connected to the same business—is peculiar. The discrepancy may be a reflection of how little these shares are actually traded or how desperate some buyers have gotten.
The chatter about valuations keeps getting louder. Anthropic was reportedly in a trillion-dollar fundraising round earlier this year. The banker Duncan uses $800 billion as his working figure, which now seems almost conservative. Following a $15 billion Series G-1 round, the most recent disclosed valuation was approximately $387 billion in February. Already, the majority of publicly traded companies will never see that figure.
Then came the news about Alphabet. Investing.com revealed on Tuesday that Anthropic had made a five-year commitment to Google Cloud totaling about $200 billion. After-hours trading saw a 2% increase in Alphabet shares. A cloud bill of $200 billion is not typical. It’s the kind of number that raises concerns about how much processing power the next generation of Claude models will truly need and indicates Anthropic expects to scale well beyond what most observers have priced in. It also begs the question of whether the value of these AI firms is truly known or if everyone is merely speculating in bigger chunks.
Naturally, none of this is available to retail investors. The only legal routes into Anthropic are via platforms like EquityZen or Forge, both of which need accreditation. Anthropic is still private. Reddit threads, forum posts, and inquiries about how to obtain a piece all convey a subtle sense of annoyance. Generally speaking, the answer is that you can’t just yet.
The underlying business is more difficult to read. Anthropic is still advancing into business. Ten AI agents targeted at banks are among the new financial services tools that were introduced this week. The business appears committed to integrating itself into sectors with lengthy contracts and high switching costs. That’s the strategy, and it seems to be effective. Although the precise amount hasn’t been revealed, revenue apparently increased in the first quarter.
However, there is a sense that this could all be a bubble, which Duncan himself admits. He has experienced three of them. He wagers that the survivors will, like Google and Amazon did after 2000, define the next era. Perhaps he is correct. However, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that everyone involved in this debate has a stake in the outcome. The market is ravenous. When it happens, the IPO will be huge. The wait is still ongoing, regardless of whether Anthropic stock proves to be the next Google or the next cautionary tale.