Why Morningstar Thinks Anthropic Is Worth $1.7 Trillion
By Google News AI ·
While we don’t know yet exactly how many shares Anthropic will sell at its IPO, or at what price, using Morningstar’s valuation methodology, we can arrive at an estimate of how much the giant artificial intelligence lab is worth.
In this article, we are presenting our base case, in which the company is worth $1.7 trillion. In addition, we consider a bull case, where our most optimistic assumptions lead us to an equity valuation of $3 trillion, and a bear case with a valuation of just $500 billion.
Other key elements in our process include assigning Anthropic a Morningstar Economic Moat Rating of narrow and a Morningstar Uncertainty Rating of Very High.
Our full company report lays out more of our assumptions around Anthropic and more details on how we see the company’s business prospects evolving.
Our fair value estimate values Anthropic’s equity at $1.7 trillion, implying a 2027 price/sales multiple of around 13 times.
We believe Anthropic is well-positioned to increase its revenue rapidly, with our base-case forecast calling for a top-line compound annual growth rate of 47% over the next five years. We see three key drivers of this revenue growth.
One, we expect the firm to drive deeper into existing accounts. The firm has almost 12,000 customers spending more than $100,000 a year, more than 1,900 customers spending $1 million annually, and more than 250 accounts spending more than $10 million each year.
We see Anthropic expanding deeper into these accounts by moving enterprises from simple, low-volume applications like Claude chat to integrating Claude into the agentic infrastructure large enterprises are trying to build. As Claude takes over more automated, long-running tasks, we see a natural inflection upward in total spending on Claude by enterprise customers.
To give some perspective on penetration, we’d note that out of Fortune 500 customers spending more than $100,000 on Anthropic’s models, their spending on Claude as a percent of their total expenditures was less than 0.1%. In other words, for every $1,000 a Fortune 500 client spends, only $1 currently goes to Anthropic. We see Anthropic being able to materially expand this number over time.
Second, while the firm has impressive enterprise penetration, new logo additions are far from over. The firm has more than 50% of the Fortune 500 as active customers. Put another way, almost 50% of the Fortune 500 still aren’t spending much, if at all, on Anthropic’s products. We’d imagine penetration for the Fortune 1000 and beyond is likely even lower.
We view these customers, many of whom are still in early innings of broader AI adoption, as greenfield opportunities for Anthropic to target.
Third, instead of trying to build an enterprise sales team directly, the firm’s strategic distribution agreements with AWS and Google Cloud allow it to scale its revenue without linearly adding more sales reps. By incorporating its models within managed AI platforms such as AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI, Anthropic can attract net new dollars toward its products.
While we are fairly confident in Anthropic’s ability to execute across these three verticals and drive sales growth, we think it is also appropriate to consider both bull and bear cases for the firm.
In our bull case, we estimate Anthropic’s five-year revenue growth rate to be north of 60%, with a 2027 price/sales multiple of 26 times. In our bull case, we estimate Anthropic’s equity value at slightly north of $3 trillion, or…
Originally published by Google News AI
