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If there\u2019s one thing that AI companies are known for, it\u2019s their fondness for seemingly incomprehensible numbers. Over the last few years, the industry has seen eye-watering salaries, unprecedented adoption figures, and never-before-recorded capital expenditure. Now come total addressable market estimates\u2014known as TAMs\u2014worth roughly 40% of the entire US equity market.<\/p>\n
AI lab Anthropic, reportedly on the verge of a $2 trillion IPO, is preparing to tell investors that its total addressable market is worth more than $30 trillion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n
To put that figure in perspective, it eclipses the total GDP of China, is roughly equal to the entire GDP of the U.S., and represents about a quarter of the total world GDP of $120 trillion.<\/p>\n
Rather than a forecast of Anthropic\u2019s imminent sales, a total addressable market, or TAM, is the annual revenue a company could theoretically generate if it captured 100% of the relevant market. TAMs are staple of the pitch decks entrepreneurs use to try to persuade venture capital firms to back them, as they give some sense of how big the company could potentially become. But they are also a common figure for IPO-stage companies attempting to justify the gulf between current revenue and a company\u2019s proposed valuation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Anthropic\u2019s case, according to the Journal, rather than starting with a category such as enterprise software, cloud computing, or AI subscriptions, the lab is said to be basing its TAM estimate on the full scope of work that could be completed with AI models.<\/p>\n
Unlike traditional enterprise software, which made workers more productive but rarely replaced them outright, Anthropic and its peers argue that their models can increasingly perform knowledge\u2011work tasks end\u2011to\u2011end\u2014from drafting legal documents to writing and reviewing code.<\/p>\n
That means the company can frame its TAM as the value of all the human labor its systems could theoretically substitute for across sectors such as legal, accounting, engineering, and business process outsourcing, Alex Brunicki, co\u2011founder and general partner at Backed VC, told Fortune.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith things like Claude and the way it writes code, you could argue it\u2019s replacing the work that humans do end-to-end, and so the TAM for those products is essentially the labor market for that work output,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
However, he noted Anthropic\u2019s ability to capture a large share of that market could easily come under pressure as more companies adopt industry\u2011specific models built on cheaper open\u2011source systems.<\/p>\n
Anthropic is not the first company to propose a larger-than-life TAM. SpaceX recently estimated its TAM at $28.5 trillion. Back in 2019, Uber famously cited a total addressable market (TAM) of $6 trillion by calculating the total mileage value of all personal cars and public transport worldwide.<\/p>\n
At the time, some financial analysts and valuation experts criticized this $6 trillion figure as aggressive marketing rather than serious math. Many are equally skeptical of Anthropic\u2019s figure.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnother way of looking at absurdity of the $30 trillion addressable market claim: annual U.S. GDP is currently $32.5 trillion,\u201d Fred Hickey, tech analyst and editor of The High-Tech Strategist, an investment newsletter, wrote on X. \u201cAnd yet this nonsense (wild proclamations and predictions) is allowed to continue so that Wall St. & Silly-con-Valley can extract as much money from unwitting \u2018investors\u2019 as possible, before the inevitable stock market bubble collapses.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brunicki also noted that professional investors will likely treat Anthropic\u2019s TAM less as a literal forecast and more as a kind of mission statement. Retail investors, however, are more likely to take the figure at face value. The sheer scale of the number is \u201cheadline\u2011grabbing\u201d and, as Brunicki notes, can be inspiring for individual traders and smaller investors who may not sit down to build their own spreadsheets.<\/p>\n
\u201cSophisticated investors are going to build their own cash\u2011flow models,\u201d he said. They will look at Anthropic\u2019s current markets, its contracts and near\u2011term product roadmap, and then forecast revenue over the next five or so years on that basis. Near\u2011term revenue targets\u2014such as Anthropic\u2019s reported ambition to reach close to $200 billion in annual sales by the end of the decade\u2014are what serious investors will pay closer attention to, Brunicki said.<\/p>\n
Echoes of the dot-com era\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are easy parallels to draw between the dot-com boom and the current AI boom.<\/p>\n
Dot-com era IPOs similarly leaned on a strategy of using a future imagined market instead of a company\u2019s current balance sheet to bridge the gap between price and performance. For example, by October 1999, the 199 internet stocks tracked by Morgan Stanley\u2019s Mary Meeker carried a combined $450 billion market cap against just $21 billion in total sales and $6.2 billion in collective losses.<\/p>\n
Brunicki said that while there were some similarities with the dot\u2011com era, the underlying businesses of AI companies look different. He said that many leading AI companies are already generating substantial revenue, rather than listing on \u201cuser numbers\u201d alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anthropic\u2019s own annualized revenue run rate surpassed $65 billion at the end of July, according to Bloomberg\u2014more than seven times the roughly $9 billion pace it was running at the end of 2025, and up from $47 billion just two months earlier, in May.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the same time, however, investors are watching closely how much leverage and debt flows into financing data center build\u2011outs and AI infrastructure. In private markets, Brunicki said, some AI startups are raising at \u201cextremely high, frothy valuations\u201d that are unlikely to be sustainable.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s our fundamental belief that the size of companies that are going to be built in this wave are going to be larger than any other companies that have come before them,\u201d Brunicki said. \u201cBut it\u2019s also our belief that the mortality rates of some of these companies and the likely blowouts of all of these businesses is also going to be large as well.\u201d Many of the companies currently raising at multi\u2011billion\u2011dollar valuations, he warned, \u201care going to go to zero.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Anthropics #trillion #market #size #estimate #outlandish #point<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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