[Digital Today Seung-ah Yoo, intern reporter] A warning has emerged that Anthropic's $2 trillion corporate valuation ahead of a Nasdaq listing is excessive.

CNBC reported on Oct. 7 that independent financial research firm New Constructs valued Anthropic at $150 billion and called the listing the "most absurd initial public offering (IPO) of 2026."

New Constructs analysed that for Anthropic to justify a $2 trillion valuation, it would need to generate profit twice the latest annual net income of Nvidia, the world's top technology company by market capitalisation. Nvidia's net income over the latest four quarters exceeded $190 billion. By contrast, a leaked draft Anthropic prospectus obtained by Reuters showed the company's 2025 revenue was $4.6 billion and its net loss reached $42 billion.

New Constructs also raised doubts about Anthropic's business viability, citing widening operating losses and competition from open-source artificial intelligence models. "It is hard to see Anthropic as having a sustainable business," it said. "It has become clear that since the emergence of open-source models, it will be difficult for closed models to generate profits," it argued.

David Trainer (데이비드 트레이너), chief executive of New Constructs, which issued the report, is known as a figure who presents pessimistic outlooks on IPOs. New Constructs called WeWork the "most absurd IPO" in 2019, and WeWork withdrew its listing before filing for bankruptcy protection in 2023. In 2021, it also delivered a negative outlook on Allbirds' IPO, and Allbirds sold its assets to U.S. Exchange Group for about $39 million earlier this year.

New Constructs' outlook has not always been correct. The firm in 2020 assessed DoorDash as a case similar to WeWork, but DoorDash exceeded a $60 billion market capitalisation on its first day of listing and has since grown to around $83 billion. In a 2021 interview with CNBC, Trainer said "absurd things do happen" and acknowledged that his judgments are not always right, while saying he should stick with what he believes is correct.

Anthropic submitted a draft prospectus confidentially, after which related financial information was leaked. New Constructs conducted its analysis based on public reports and leaked financial figures without directly verifying the official S-1. The New York Times reported in September that Anthropic could post $100 billion in annualised revenue by the end of 2026, and Anthropic said its annualised revenue at the end of July was $65 billion, up sevenfold from a year earlier.

New Constructs also cited as an investment risk that Anthropic has warned AI could cause "catastrophic or existential risk" to humanity. It also argued the IPO is more aimed at providing liquidity to existing Wall Street investors than at increasing the wealth of public market investors.