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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

He didn't say AI is doomed or a fluke, he said that these two AI companies aren't worth 1T in capitalization.

The same way semiconductor, internet or railroad companies were not great investments regardless of how important the technology was going to be. It's still a financial investment and it's only going to pay off if bought at the right price, not at crazy multiples.

I will also add: if all your moat is your latest model, you're as good as your latest model and can be easily dethroned.

Strong moats are monopoly-like concessions (Verisign), exclusive technological edge (ASML), brands (Coca Cola), etc.

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> Strong moats are monopoly-like concessions (Verisign), exclusive technological edge (ASML), brands (Coca Cola), etc.

Agreed with the exception of Verisign. Many a "security" company went bust like DigiNotar after mishaps or hacks. Being a globally trusted root CA or DNS operator is a strong moat - but also an incredibly brittle one.

And brands... brands aren't as safe as we thought either, as "store brands"/"private labels" are taking up more and more market share [1].

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/shoppers-are-tradi...

Anthropic is the one company where that makes no sense. If revenue really is about 50 billion annually and growing than that means that a 20x 1 year of revenue valuation is modest compared to the shenanigans that have been going in the market. It's almost classically textbook conservative in comparison. The moat with these corporate enterprise contracts is literally your conversation history and companies aren't likely to jump ship when everyone likes the tools so long as costs stay nominal. AI at most orgs isn't even the biggest line item.

All competitors need are their latest model to be either better or similar but much cheaper. And Anthropic has no less than 2 big competitors in the space in US alone providing similar quality models.

There's no moat in LLMs when you're as good as your latest model.

Companies out there aren't in the business of throwing money down the drain.

Take DS4, you can use Deepseek APIs directly with Claude Code, and you're unlikely to notice a difference for the overwhelming majority of your use cases. But your bills run in few $ per day. I'm talking 2 magnitudes less.

You forget the institutional inertia of how these things get negotiated from year to year. If something is working for people they tend to wanna keep it. The existing curation of how everything works is cheaper than rolling your own. Sure you can get something running yourself but integrations for a lot of people are worth some of this cost. Also for AI heavy customers (multimedia, video, etc) the sky is the limit and there's not enough processing for it right now.

That logic works for 20 vs 40$ SaaS subscriptions, not for burning triple/four digits per day in APIs.

We know nothing about Anthropic, they make a few money go round deals, announce a bit of revenue, extrapolate it into the whole year and people parrot that they may be making $50bn. Most likely the cost to remain competitive eats at whatever revenue they could hope to make. I expect them to fudge the numbers the last quarter before their IPO, dump on passive investors, and then go back to being officially unprofitable.

As of March 2026 lifetime revenue was >=~ $5 billion, and total 2025 revenue was supposedly around $4.5 billion.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...

What does revenue have to do with it? Mercedes has a revenue of $130 billion, profit of $5 billion and a market cap of $56 billion.

According to your logic, it should have a market cap of $2.6 trillion.

Conservative is to look at P/E, which is 10 for Mercedes.

Anthropic isn't even a growth stock, since it has already been force fed to everyone with one of the largest marketing and coercion campaigns in history.

I've had economics professors tell me that a "normal" business valuation is 10 years of profit so your example is in line with my thinking there. I'm just as curious to see the final numbers as you but if they are even approaching them it's not very out there to consider a high valuation. I don't wish to speculate on what the numbers actually are. I want to see them too.

Anthropic has negative profit. There are rumors they had one quarter of profit with some accounting shenanigans.

It also has no path to become profitable.

> If revenue really is about 50 billion annually

Might I interest you in some bridges sir?

> brands (Coca Cola), etc.

Paul Graham doesn't think so

https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html

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