# Wall Street Has No Idea What Anthropic Is Worth — Transcript (2026-11-11)

https://aidailybrief.ai/e/2026-11-11 · Listen: https://pod.link/1680633614

---

[00:00:00] With Anthropic's IPO coming up next week, we are getting numbers. We're finally seeing what valuation we wanna go out at. We're getting investors' response to that valuation. we're getting debates on what it says about the AI trade.

And all that is happening as Anthropic continues to release new products that rip market cap off of competitors

Today we're talking about everything we know heading into the IPO and why basically I think that we know nothing at all

The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Robots and Pencils, CData, and Blitzy. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts

And if you wanna learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai.

And while you're there, catch a link to check out the new How We Got Here podcast. It is a long form show, so if you like the more big think episodes of the AI Daily Brief, you should definitely check it out. Again, it's called How We Got Here with NLW. You [00:01:00] can find it linked in the show notes or go to howwegothere.com.

Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes, and we have a lot to get through today. Google has released officially Gemini 4 Carbon, the second iteration of their latest ultra-large model. Carbon, you might remember, was previewed at the end of October, and at the time, it was the top-ranked model on the Artificial Analysis Index

Unfortunately, Google said the model was still going through the government's voluntary safety testing process and wasn't yet ready for public release. and although people were hopeful, nobody was really willing to get all that excited until they got access to it themselves.

Now, two weeks later, even if Fable 5.2 has definitively claimed the top spot on the rankings and is this week's shiny new model

People digging into carbon are finding lots to like

We have the usual render tests where Carbon stands up remarkably well In fact, absent some of the mind-blowing capabilities of Fable 5.2, this would likely be the most impressive version of AI-generated animations



Ethan Mollick showed off what you can do by combining this with [00:02:00] Google's strong multimodal capability using Carbon to recreate a real-world video clip of a train ride in Three.js

He wrote, " "It is It is a very good model that improves on Argon. It's useful to have an AI that thinks differently than Claude and GPT and is still highly capable but has its own strength and weaknesses

Still, the coding capabilities might be the most interesting upgrade with Carbon. Google has, of course, struggled mightily with AI coding over the years But Carbon seems to mark a new moment in their catch-up efforts. Pushmeet Kohli, the VP of DeepMind, showcased a formal verification of Signal's security properties, which required Carbon to analyze the machine code underpinning the software.

He wrote, " More than a research breakthrough, it's a prime example of how frontier AI can be a force multiplier to counter the speed and scale of modern cyber threats. Formal verification offers a higher standard of security. However, it's extremely complex and time-consuming, which is why in many cases it's considered to be impractical.

Similar efforts could take teams decades of combined effort. We did it in a month's time."

Pavel Hurin took Carbon out for a spin on some more mundane coding problems, running it [00:03:00] through his bug hunt test, and he found that Carbon found fifty-seven of the one hundred and five bugs, second only to Fable 5.2 at fifty-eight Perhaps even more impressive was that Carbon completed the run for $31, compared to almost 140 for Fable 5.



Corin commented, " Google's own benchmarks looked super strong, but nobody could access the model. Turns out they didn't lie. Nobody should be laughing at Google anymore."

Importantly, these cost savings were pretty consistent across a range of other use cases. One render test produced similar results to Fable 5 too at a third of the cost It is still early, but overall it's looking like this is an extremely competent model that's competitive with rivals in the ultra-large model class category

Carbon gives those who are locked into the Google ecosystem a very meaningful upgrade and a new level of coding ability, and potentially signals a turn

Ethan Mollick again sums up, " One of the most significant things about Gemini 4.0 Carbon is that it is showing that Google is back in the race of frontier models, rapid releases, and rapid improvement."

Next up, we move on to the scandalous. [00:04:00] Nvidia's Chinese spy scandal continues to reverberate across the headlines as Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley ask what can be done about Jensen Huang. On Monday, President Trump held a press conference to discuss it.

He said, " "I know the I know the FBI is looking into it."

In terms of something else, and I think he'll be in good shape. I just know Jensen very well. I just think he's a very honorable man. I mean, he built a great American company, and I think he's a very honorable guy. Trump acknowledged that he had knowledge of the affair before it was reported last weekend, but was vague about the precise timing One of the key details from The New York Times reporting was that President Trump was fully briefed on the matter last April, but elected to do nothing

Tuesday's news also brought the revelation that as much as seven point five billion dollars worth of Nvidia chips may have been funneled to Chinese companies through Megaspeed. That's the Neocloud that employed Alice Huang, who is the alleged Chinese spy. The number comes from sources speaking to the information who claim to know Alice Huang personally.

The information's reporting claims a vast smuggling network existed behind Megaspeed, And they seem to have a full recap of how the chips flowed through it 

[00:05:00] The New York Times, meanwhile, continues to land bombshells, reporting that a Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed was halted after contact from NVIDIA. The reporting claims that NVIDIA General Counsel Tim Teter discussed the case directly with investigators and said their superior at the Commerce Department had approved the contact.

Sources said the Commerce Department agents were alarmed that their superior was mentioned and were concerned he was, quote, " violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case."

Sources told The Information that the Commerce Department is working on new export controls, including shutting down the remote access loophole for Nvidia chips But But at the same time, they're delaying their decision to place Megaspeed on the entity list and block all exports to the company that is supposedly run by Chinese spies

Meanwhile, House Republicans are insistent that Jensen comes to Washington to explain himself If Jensen doesn't accept their invitation for a closed-door meeting next week, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast said he's prepared to issue a subpoena And overlaid on top of all of it is the question of what NVIDIA should do about Jensen.



some market commentators have noted that Jensen is just about the only CEO [00:06:00] that could become engulfed in an international espionage scandal and keep his job

Nvidia has a famously flat structure and Jensen juggling 60 direct reports. What's more, The Wall Street Journal reports that Nvidia has no succession plan, and the board of directors was treated as more of a governance formality than a check on the CEO

Rene Haas, the CEO of Arm, who previously worked for NVIDIA, said in a 2024 interview that Jensen had resisted succession planning for years, commenting, " He didn't like the idea. He felt it would create competition among executives and be divisive." The board is currently investigating Jensen with the help of an outside law firm.

But even if they find damning evidence, it's unclear what the correct path will be.

Given that the board has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, getting rid of a charismatic CEO with no succession plan seems risky to say the least. even kicking him upstairs to the chairman's role has its risks The Wall Street Journal is currently suggesting that a reined-in Jensen is Nvidia's best option.

They wrote that Nvidia's task is to, quote, " Find a way to keep Huang on while reassuring shareholders, the government, and the general public that it takes national security risks seriously."

That [00:07:00] seems like a tall order, but the stakes are also extremely high for the nation at large. Nvidia stock is down eleven percent since the story broke in an otherwise positive market. The company makes up seven percent weighting in the S&P 500 and around eight percent in the Nasdaq, meaning most US investors have a ton of Nvidia exposure

What's more, the company's success has become a matter of national security via the AI race. In short, there is just not a simple solution to the scandal, and it seems that the entire nation, not just NVIDIA, is experiencing the mother of all keyman risks

One small but interesting NVIDIA side story



consulting giant Booz Allen has switched to open source, adopting NVIDIA's Nemotron 

finally finally today, a set of OpenAI news

The company's revenue is soaring after a strong reception with GPT-6 Astra. Sources speaking with Bloomberg said that Q3 revenue came in above ten billion dollars, a record quarter for OpenAI, and a fifty percent increase from quarter two

Operating losses also grew, reportedly coming in between 10.1 and 10.9 billion. And while operating margin did come down from negative 150 to negative 109, [00:08:00] OpenAI still has a long way to go before turning a profit. Still, this is definitely a good news story for OpenAI who has been struggling to shift the narrative

with regard to their own growth vis-a-vis Anthropic. Q2's quarter-over-quarter growth rate was only seventeen percent, which would be exciting for most companies, but a little lacking compared to Anthropic's one hundred and forty-four percent for Q2.

Sources highlighted solid API demand for recent model releases, including GPT-5 six Soul and GPT-6 Astra as the driving force of the growth They also mentioned API demand for OpenAI's image models, which have seemed to be a quiet success for the company In addition, OpenAI brought in ad revenue at a billion-dollar annualized pace, adding significantly to the bottom line

and overall, the numbers have analysts reconsidering where OpenAI sits in the AI race positively for the first time in a while

OpenAI has also acquired an AI travel agent. Francis Davidson, the founder of Odessa, announced that OpenAI had acquired his startup on Tuesday.

Odessia was founded less than a year ago, and it seems it's still pretty small.

Last summer, they booked $60 million in travel across tens of thousands of users, which while huge for an early-stage startup, is a drop in the ocean [00:09:00] for the multi-trillion dollar travel industry

Davidson was previously the founder of Sonder, an Airbnb competitor which grew to a thousand-person headcount and went public via SPAC in 2022. It filed for bankruptcy in 2025 after a key partnership with Marriott fell apart. This time around, Davidson wrote that he threw out the old playbook and tried to build a lean startup with AI-first process At some point, I might come back to his blog post, which gives a ton of the tips around how he works, including dictating around 1.2 million words a month, which is around 11 books

But for OpenAI's part, they're staying pretty quiet about their future plans for travel

Odyssey has shut down their service as part of the acquisition, and it's a little unclear whether Davidson will be working on existing travel features in ChatGPT or launching something new

Lastly, OpenAI has introduced a new business hub that offers more powerful tools to companies advertising on the platform. The business hub allows businessesto register their details with OpenAI and includes a dashboard that tracks advertising metrics similar to Google Analytics the other big addition is the ability to create what OpenAI is calling business agents.

If a brand has the feature enabled, consumers will be able to speak with a business agent after [00:10:00] clicking on an ad to ask any questions or explore the brand's range. Businesses can provide their agents with instructions and additional context to ensure they represent the brand appropriately

And if you don't see this as how Meta Muse and ChatGPT start competing more directly

I don't know what to tell you

What I think you can assume is that we are about to see a lot more integration And consideration of ChatGPT as a commerce platform given how many of the answers it provides consumers relate in some way to shopping or commerce

Lots more to explore there, but for now, that is gonna do it for today's headlines. Next up, the main episode If you're leading AI inside an enterprise, you already know that the gap right now isn't capability, but execution. That's why KPMG's You Can with AI is back with a new season featuring conversations with leaders like Serojia Chatterjee of Emma, May Habib of Writer, Ellery Fisher, and others focused on practical execution.

What's working, what's not, and what it actually takes to move from pilots to real scaled impact across strategy, data readiness, governance, workforce, and [00:11:00] value. And of course, it's co-hosted by me, Nathaniel Whittemore. Go listen and subscribe at www.kpmg.us/aipodcasts. That's www.kpmg.us/aipodcasts. 

The best teams don't have a single star carrying everyone else. They know their own strengths and each other's weaknesses and play to both. That's the team Robots and Pencils has built on purpose. Nobody there is grinding through busy work to pad a headcount number.

People come for the hard problems, and they stay because everyone around them is leveling up at the same time. In a market full of companies that are just trying to hire fast, that's worth a look. check out robotsandpencils.com/careers 

This episode is brought to you by Cdata. Token spend is climbing, security is holding agents back, and companies rolling out AI initiatives might not know how it's truly being used

The root cause: AI is cut off from the systems and context your business runs on.

That's why CData built Connect AI Gateway, one control point between your AI and your systems

Connect AI [00:12:00] Gateway is not just another static model router. prompts get intelligently routed to the right model with exactly the tools and data it needs governed down to the record

The result? Accurate answers at a fraction of the token cost with a context engine that learns your business with every interaction. Built on the connectivity layer powering Palantir, Google, Salesforce, and hundreds more. Give it a try and start your free trial at cdata.ai. That's C as in connect data.ai 

Here's why most legacy modernization projects fail. The AI doing the work can't understand code bases at scale. it sees a small slice of context, examines syntax, and misses years of decisions distributed across the global application ecosystem

Blitzy solves this the way it solves everything. Grounded in your code before any migration begins, Blitzy's agents reverse engineer the entire legacy system into a persistent knowledge graph. Every dependency, every constraint, every piece of tribal knowledge that used to live in one engineer's head.

From that understanding, Blitzy autonomously executes language migrations, framework upgrades, and monolith-to-microservices transformations, all validated end to end [00:13:00] One Blitzy customer modernized a $10 million monolithic insurance stack in 16 weeks against a 137-week baseline with coding agents. That's 9X compression.

Retire technical debt while accelerating your roadmap. See how at blitzy.com. That's B-L-I-T-Z-Y.com



Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief



at this point, the speculation has come and gone

And the midterm blue wave that brought a bunch of theoretical data center opponents to power has not deterred Anthropic from going public as some imagined it might.



in fact, it appears that the IPO will go off before Thanksgiving, with the company aiming to go public next week

Anthropic kicked off their roadshow and are making their final pitch to the market



here's an excerpt from the Roadshow video today With Dario making his most consolidated pitch

society trusts and society believes can build the benefits in the right way. I think if we do this right, we can create an age of miracles where h-humanity is able to [00:14:00] solve problems that have eluded us for millennia. We have to make sure that all the risks, all the ways that things can go wrong with this technology, we very carefully address those risks as we bring the benefits and as we have a viable business at the same time.

And I invite you to join us on the next phase of this journey.

Now interestingly, for a company that has often struggled to find the right balance of these messages. because careful listeners will know that none of that Dario just said is a new statement for the company

But the balance

That the point, in fact, is the age of miracles, and that the risks are simply what we have to overcome to achieve those miracles, is something that has, I think, in the past eluded it

And of course, that's not the only communications coming from Anthropic and Dario

Given how much contention there has been between Anthropic and the Department of Defense/War



Many were surprised about the crispness of his answer to Emily Chang of Bloomberg



when she asked in no [00:15:00] uncertain terms

If he was comfortable with Claude helping the military kill more people more quickly



Dario reinterpreted the question and said, "Basically, what you're asking is do you want this country to be a stronger country?" To which he said, "Of course I do. I'm a patriot." But more than that, he said, the decision about what to do with the technology is not ours to make.

You have to trust the military to make those decisions. And whatever I might think as a private citizen, that has no bearing on the decisions the military makes, and it's not the job of the technology provider to make those decisions except to provide some very high-level boundaries

Once again, there's nothing there that's necessarily a radical departure from things Dario has said before



Although I don't believe that he's ever been quite so crisp About saying that it is not the technology provider's decision about what the military uses that technology for

But the way that this is being delivered is finally clicking

Still for the markets

None of that is as important as the question of price

Anthropic is asking between seventy dollars and seventy-eight [00:16:00] dollars per share, which puts the implied valuation somewhere between one point two five trillion and one point four trillion. Anthropic said they seek to raise between fifty-seven billion and sixty-four billion

That said, Anthropic is also raising twenty-six billion from industry partners, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Broadcom, with Nvidia and Google being the largest participants at up to ten billion dollars apiece. Combined with the so-called green shoe option that allows underwriters to buy extra shares to service excess demand over the first month, Anthropic will float a total of around a hundred billion dollars in stock.

Now, Now, on the one hand, the valuation is lower than previous discussions

In September, investors floated a $2 trillion valuation in the press And while some took that as a reasonable evaluation for a few weeks, in more recent times we've seen the valuation estimates tick lower. One point six trillion was mentioned, then one point five, and ultimately last week's reporting had one group of investors saying the IPO might need to price at one point one trillion to get sufficient demand

Now, one thing that has driven me absolutely batty about the coverage of these numbers is that they've been [00:17:00] treated as specific targets coming from Anthropic. in other words, like Anthropic has had to rein in its ambitions because it went out for two trillion and was unsuccessful and had to settle for 1.4 trillion.

Let's Let's be clear about the fact that that is not what happened. Some journalist got a source from some investor around Anthropic By the way, we have no idea which investor, how close to Anthropic they are, whether they're actually even invested in Anthropic or whether they're just an investor on deep background And the $2 trillion number was so splashy that it stuck



Anthropic, of course, can't comment being in their quiet period, and so the narrative takes hold. Now, there is still valuable signal in understanding how investor expectations have changed over the time

Darcy AGI on X wrote, "October really changed the mood around AI valuations." And to the extent that that's what we're drawing from the analysis, I completely agree but let's not pretend as though this somehow represents some failure of a goal that Anthropic had set. What's more, again, as Mr.

Darcy points out when he says, "I think this might be a much healthier starting point

There is evidence that [00:18:00] that's the case Within a day of that lower valuation target between one point two five trillion and one point four trillion being made public, it already started to seem like it was being pitched too low. The Financial Times reports that Anthropic's investment banking partners plan to raise the share price to reflect a top-end valuation of one point five trillion

The article stated the revision was being considered after receiving, quote, "strong indications of demand."

It also added that Anthropic cares much more about raising cash than valuation due to their large compute commitments



and and basically what I think we should take

from all of the discourse around the IPO price is that investors do not have

A clear idea of what to expect, what they think is reasonable, what they think others think is reasonable, what they think others expect

and we are kind of just flailing around until the thing actually happens

There are plenty of bears out there who are promoting the idea that the reduction in valuation is a bearish signal and who continue to think that Anthropic underperforming on their IPO will trigger another leg down in the AI trade overall



John [00:19:00] John Ma from Artemis actually argued that this is increasingly the consensus view. That Anthropic is overvalued at one point five trillion, that revenue is flattening, that tokens are being commoditized due to open source, the token prices are falling faster than demand

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera



and yet as he points out, there is a pretty compelling contrarian case

One part of that



is that Anthropic reported that their run rate revenue was up a full $10 billion in the month of October, reaching $81 billion by the end of the month



and and not only does that number show strong continued growth That remains primarily driven by the coding agent use case and obviously reflects Opus 5.5, but not Fable 5.2 According to Ma, the contrarian case points out that finance, legal, life sciences are all super early, and even that agents are still early and most businesses still think of AI as ChatGPT and the Claude app

The contrarian take also points out that retail is frankly starving for direct exposure to Frontier Labs



and will ape in regardless of the valuation and drive Anthropic to three trillion in market cap



for for a point of view that simply tries to use proxies and math, [00:20:00] iCapital's chief investment strategist, Sonali Basak points out that at a $1.4 trillion valuation That would represent around 40X trailing 12-month revenue. She points out that by comparison, Palantir is trading at roughly 55X, meaning Anthropic would be closer to multiples not of Palantir, but of CrowdStrike and Cloudflare



Now, of Now, of course, the other thing that some investors are going to be focused on even more than valuation and revenue is future compute commitments In their updated IPO paperwork, Anthropic disclosed $10 billion in new commitments with Microsoft and Google.

The new commitments are stretched over the next seven years. The same document also said that a $35 billion deal with Neo Cloud Lambda could be canceled due to non-performance Lambda has defaulted on the contract after blowing a deadline, and Anthropic said in their filing that they're within their rights to cancel the deal but does not currently intend to.

Now, this reshuffling of cloud deals gives us a little more insight into how Anthropic's compute spend is structured



When When their IPO paperwork was first made public, many analysts were alarmed to see hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in compute commitments, with much of it being [00:21:00] non-cancellable

What would happen if AI demand faltered? And yet a lot of observers who have not been unsympathetic to these questions have pointed out that it feels like more of the risk lies with the Neoclouds

Who frankly have far more risk of dragging the rest of the industry down with them even should they implode



one of the interesting reversions that some are having as they look at this Lambda deal

is that it basically brings up the question, which is more likely to happen first? AI demand reducing such that Anthropic can't meet its commitments



or the Neoclouds to whom that revenue is due



hitting problems in either financing or construction that don't allow them to deliver finished data centers on time

still wherever you fall in that, this is going to be a continued narrative, and it is absolutely not going to go away after the company goes public

So So finally though, as all of this debate was happening

We also did get one more indication of

how immense investors view the power of Anthropic to disrupt other companies

Alongside all of their IPO updates, they launched a new productivity suite That many are seeing as a pretty direct shot at Microsoft and perhaps Google as well. The suite includes [00:22:00] Claude Sheets, Claude Whiteboards, and Claude Data. Claude Sheets is Anthropic's direct competitor for Excel, with a much greater focus on collaborative work with humans and agents

Claude Whiteboards is a team planning surface for organizing projects and ideas. Claude Data, meanwhile, is the evolution of the feature previously known as Dashboards, which allows users to pull in data from CRMs and database platforms to create live data feeds. It competes with Microsoft's Power BI, but adds the ability to use Anthropic's models to generate visual data stories or narrated short videos.

These are, in other words, business productivity tools And while many are trying to read it as a declaration of war against Microsoft, Anthropic framed it as merely the way the world is going. They wrote, " Inside Anthropic, non-technical teams are starting to get as much out of Claude as our engineers. Our legal team worked with Claude to build a Slack-based legal review tool that automatically draws red lines from the team's own playbook.

This brought marketing reviews from three days down to twenty-four hours, and easy fixes are made before a lawyer reviews the draft. Our finance team turned a long business update document for executives into an interactive page, and now the whole team updates it together with [00:23:00] Claude.

Neither of these teams writes code, but they're experts in their fields. They use Claude to turn that knowledge into tools that save them time and that others can use." In other words, when Claude becomes the shared work surface, you kind of just need this sort of infrastructure around 

it, a perhaps more concerning way to put it for Microsoft

is that the competition for where work happens

started the moment ChatGPT launched in November of 2022. And increasingly, the place where work happens is inside the LLM Harnesser app And this is just the natural extension of that

Matthew Berman wrote, "I keep trying to warn you. If you build software, the labs will compete with you." And it seems that investors agreed, driving Microsoft stock down two point two percent on the news

Gabrielle pointed out, however, that even if

These tools start to pick up market share. Microsoft is very likely to be fine

He writes

Excel will be fine. No enterprise is ditching Excel for this. Claude Sheets even exports to Excel. Microsoft is on every side of this. They're buying into the IPO next week, Anthropic owes them forty-five billion in cloud spend, and they resell the [00:24:00] model through Copilot. They're an investor, landlord, reseller, and now the competition.

They want Anthropic to do well. It's funny Microsoft dipped on this. But look, ultimately, I think that the dip is yet another indication of the market just trying to work out what this all means, and perhaps even recognizing that it just isn't sure yet Still, whether the market knows or not, the IPO is happening, and it's happening soon

So buckle up, buttercup, because the next phase is here. For now, that's gonna do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always, and until next time, peace 

​