Valuing Anthropic: Heeding the Feedback Loop

I valued Anthropic, after its prospectus filing and ahead of its IPO, at $1.475 trillion about a week ago, and was open about the fact that I was telling a big story, with inputs and value to match. I encouraged people to push back and come up with their own stories, inputs and values for the company and many did. In this session, I start by playing devil's advocate with my own valuation, and list what I believe are the five biggest drivers of its value - target revenues tops the list, followed by governance, profitability , reinvestment and regulatory risk. I then look at your valuations and feedback, and note that the input that received the most pushback was my cost of capital of 9.74% , which some thought was too low. Since the cost of capital is much misunderstood concept that many use without frames of reference, I look at what a reasonable cost of equity (capital) is for a US firm in September 2026, and follow up with a table that lists out ranges for costs of capital, by sector. I argue that setting too high a cost of equity (capital) handicaps investors and businesses, creating more harm than good.

Slides: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/blog/AnthropicFollowUp.pdf

Blog post: https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2026/11/the-anthropic-feedback-loop-cost-of.html

Cost of capital, by industry group: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/blog/waccUS.xlsx