The AI IPO Wave Is The Dot-Com Bubble’s Evil Twin. Anthropic’s Delay Just Proved It.
In this guest article from Airrived co-founder and CEO Anurag Gurtu, he contends that Anthropic’s rapid revenue growth does not justify its proposed $2 trillion IPO valuation, given enormous infrastructure commitments, safety concerns, customer concentration and competition from cheaper open-weight models, saying instead that lasting enterprise AI value will come from proprietary data, reliable…
The AI industry is facing a bubble similar to the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, with Anthropic's recent IPO delay acting as a warning sign. The company's third-quarter revenue for 2026 was reported at $16.8 billion, a 45% increase from the previous quarter, suggesting an annual run rate of around $67 billion. However, the IPO prospectus reveals a different picture, with a full-year 2025 revenue of $4.6 billion, a $7.33 billion spend on compute and infrastructure in 2025, and a $42 billion net loss for the same year.
Anthropic expects to spend at least $518 billion on AI infrastructure over the next decade, valuing the company at $2 trillion for a November 2026 IPO. This is 435 times its 2025 revenue, raising concerns about unsustainable valuation and pricing. The IPO delay comes after the NYC pension fund asked Anthropic to postpone, citing safety concerns over AI's potential to behave unpredictably, create security issues, and even pose existential risks to humanity.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also delayed his company's IPO, calling it "ill-advised" amid AI safety concerns. The recent chip-stock selloff, totaling $2 trillion, is attributed partly to worries over AI buildout costs. Gartner predicts AI data centers could generate up to $3.6 trillion in revenue by 2030, while the required investment stands at $8.5 trillion, underscoring the gap between projected revenue and required investment.
Critics argue that Anthropic's valuation is based on a closed-model AI system that offers a premium over open-weight alternatives, but this premium is being eroded by open-weight AI's rapid advancement. Current enterprise AI adoption stands at 23% to 67% in 2026, with companies reporting 70% to 90% cost savings, and DeepSeek R1 offering frontier-level performance at significantly lower costs.
New Constructs, a research firm, describes Anthropic's proposed offering as a test of "investor gullibility," requiring a 10% after-tax operating margin for a decade, extraordinary revenue growth, and annual after-tax operating profits of $358 billion by 2035, which seems highly unlikely given current market conditions.
Written by urgent.news from Crunchbase News's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
