Morningstar Values Anthropic at $1.7 Trillion, Above the Top of Its IPO Price Range

The estimate comes from Malik Ahmed Khan, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar. A follow-up note from the firm carried the headline "We See the Stock as Undervalued in the IPO Pricing Range". At the top of the range Anthropic would be worth $1.404 trillion on a fully diluted basis, so Morningstar's fair value is roughly 21% above the highest price the company is currently marketing. For investors weighing an allocation in the largest listing on record, this is one of the first published independent valuations to set against the bankers' range.

Morningstar's spread of outcomes is wide. Its base case assumes revenue grows at a compound rate of 47% over five years and values the company at about 13 times 2027 sales. Its bull case, slightly above $3 trillion, assumes growth of more than 60% a year, a 26 times sales multiple and Anthropic capturing 14% of total software and IT services budgets within five years. The bear case puts the equity at $500 billion, assuming 22% annual growth, slow enterprise adoption and model capabilities that improve more gradually, which would open fewer markets. Morningstar gives Anthropic a Very High uncertainty rating.

The base case rests largely on spending by Anthropic's existing business customers. Khan pointed to nearly 12,000 customers spending more than $100,000 a year, more than 1,900 spending $1 million or more and over 250 spending more than $10 million. Among Fortune 500 customers that spend more than $100,000, Claude accounts for less than 0.1% of their total spending, he wrote, and more than half of the Fortune 500 are already active customers. Distribution through Amazon Web Services' Bedrock and Google Cloud's Vertex AI lets the company grow revenue without adding salespeople at the same pace, he added.

Morningstar assigns Anthropic a narrow economic moat, based mainly on intangible assets and cost advantages, with switching costs and an indirect network effect still emerging. The firm expects the company to earn returns above its cost of capital over the next decade.

The analysis lists two main risks. The base case assumes that scaling laws, under which larger models keep improving, continue to hold in areas customers will pay for, and Morningstar notes that this may not last. The speed of enterprise adoption is the other: fast adoption would lift revenue and margins above the base case, while slow adoption would push back profitability. Morningstar estimates that the gap between those scenarios amounts to roughly $500 billion of 2031 revenue across the frontier labs.

The offering covers 825 million Class A shares, to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, and would raise $57.75 billion to $64.35 billion. Seven suppliers, AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC, have agreed to buy $26 billion of non-voting stock at the IPO price in a concurrent private sale. Up to 20% of the offering is set aside for retail investors. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are among the underwriters.

Morningstar's view sits within a wide band of outside estimates. Goldman Sachs has modelled Anthropic's revenue at $685 billion by 2030, and the Financial Times reported that bankers were preparing to lift the valuation above the marketed range. Anthropic is expected to list close to November 19.