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Anthropic Wants $1.4 Trillion From the Public Market. It Lost $104 Billion in the Last Nine Months.

By Warren Buffett · 2026-11-10 · 4 min read

Satire. Parody written in the voice of Warren Buffett, who did not write or endorse it. About this column

Pull up a chair and a cherry soda, because the biggest lemonade stand in history just put up its price sign.

On Tuesday, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, filed an updated IPO document setting a price range of $70 to $78 a share on 825 million Class A shares, according to TechCrunch. That raises somewhere between $57.75 billion and $64.35 billion. Price it at the top and the company is worth $1.404 trillion, fully diluted. CNBC reports trading should start on the Nasdaq around November 19, under the ticker ANT, with up to 20% of the offering set aside for retail investors.

Now here is the part of the filing I read twice. Over the first nine months of the year, Anthropic took in $33.2 billion in revenue and reported a net loss of $104 billion. Its compute and infrastructure commitments come to $900.9 billion. It has about $132 billion in cash and short-term investments to work with.

The Numbers, Laid Out on the Kitchen Table

• Revenue run-rate: $81 billion at the end of October, about $10 billion higher than a month earlier. That is real growth.
• Valuation path: $965 billion in a May fundraise, up to $1.404 trillion now, below the roughly $2 trillion it was reportedly aiming for a couple of months ago.
• The friends-and-family round: a separate $26 billion private sale of non-voting stock to AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC. Google and Nvidia put in $10 billion apiece.
• The founders: seven co-founders are each selling nearly 3.4 million shares, roughly $250 million apiece at the $74 midpoint.
• The vote: as a public benefit corporation, the founders hold a Class F share carrying 50.1% of the voting power, and a Long-Term Benefit Trust elects a board majority. Class A buyers get the ride, not the steering wheel.

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. In this filing, the price is printed in bold and the value is a forecast.”

I am not telling you this is a bad business. A company that grows a run-rate by $10 billion in a single month is not a lemonade stand, whatever I said in my opening line. I am telling you that the price assumes the next ten years go right, and the losses tell you how expensive it is to make them go right. For comparison, rival OpenAI was reportedly valued at $1.25 trillion last week after raising $11 billion, about half of the $20 billion it first set out to raise.

The Lesson Is Not Really About Stock

Here is the folksy part. When one company is priced like it will win everything, the market is making a single bet. Most of us should not run our lives on a single bet, and that goes for the AI we ask questions of, too.

Claude is excellent. So are ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok. They take turns being the best at things almost weekly, and every one of them will occasionally give you a confident wrong answer with a straight face. If you would not put your whole retirement in one stock, do not put your whole answer in one model.

That is the simple idea behind Gangsta AI: ask the same question to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and 30+ other models at once, see where they agree, see where one is wandering off, and get one cross-checked, cited verdict. Diversification, applied to answers. Costs a lot less than $74 a share.

If you want to know which models are actually earning their keep right now, start with our guide to the best AI models.

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