BlockBeats News, August 18th, Anthropic's revenue growth continues to accelerate into the spotlight of the capital markets, but controversy surrounding its valuation is also heating up.

Bloomberg previously reported that as of the end of July, Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate reached about $65 billion. This number still appears impressive on the surface, but the market discussion has shifted to another layer: amidst optimistic expectations from some third-party data and AI circles pointing to over $80 billion, does $65 billion imply that the growth rate is slowing down?

The controversy first arises from the ARR caliber. ARR, or Annual Recurring Revenue, essentially annualizes the current revenue rate and does not equate to audited full-year revenue. Sacra data shows that Anthropic's May annualized revenue was around $47 billion, rising to $65 billion in July, but at the same time cautions that revenue from cloud channels such as AWS, Google, Microsoft may be recognized on a gross basis, making the revenue scale appear larger and increasing market scrutiny on gross margin and revenue quality.

The optimists still believe that this number is sufficient to prove strong enterprise AI demand. Gavin Baker of Atreides Management believes that Anthropic has had a relative advantage over OpenAI in token efficiency; Harrison Rolfes of PitchBook points out that even if the model price is higher, if the success rate of tasks is higher, enterprise clients may still accept a higher unit price. In other words, the focus of the bulls is not just the scale of API calls, but Claude's ability to generate revenue in enterprise workflows.

The skeptics, on the other hand, believe that the market needs to wait for the IPO prospectus to validate. Simon Willison previously noted that run-rate revenue usually comes from short-term revenue annualization and cannot be directly regarded as full-year accounting revenue. Ken Koo of ThinkFast also reminds that the real importance will lie in the audited revenue, gross margin, customer concentration, computational power procurement obligations, and cash flow in the S-1 filing. Ed Zitron more directly questions whether an AI company's ARR may be influenced by prepaid tokens, cloud channel revenue, and short-term usage fluctuations.

This discussion is no longer just about Anthropic's valuation. Steve Eisman previously referred to OpenAI and Anthropic as key risk points in AI trading, as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, and other tech giants' capital expenditures and cloud revenue expectations are increasingly tied to leading AI labs.