Walmart Worth Less Than Anthropic

It is a staggering valuation. AI superstar Anthropic raised $65 billion with a post-money valuation of $965 billion. That pushed it ahead of arch-rival OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $852 billion. It also puts the Anthropic’s figure ahead of Walmart (NYSE: WMT | WMT Price Prediction), which has a market cap of $948 billion.

Walmart is the second-largest company in the US, after Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). Walmart’s revenue in its most recent fiscal year was $713 billion, with net income of $22 billion. Walmart has just shy of 11,000 stores worldwide and employs 2.1 million people. The employment number is about the same as the number of residents in New Mexico.

Anthropic’s revenue in the most recent quarter was $10.2 billion, on which $559 million in operating profit. That puts its annual revenue run rate at about $40 billion. Anthropic forecasts that its revenue in 2028 will be $70 billion. In the wild west of AI companies, that forecast number is little more than a guess.

Anthropic’s valuation is based on the belief that AI is the most important technology in history, that it is one of the companies that will rule the sector, and that AI has a tremendous commercial future. (It also depends on whether it can build data centers, which, in aggregate, could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.) It has received large investments from companies such as Amazon and Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), which are willing to back it as one of, if not the, industry leader.

The entire AI sector’s future is beyond reasonable forecasts. Should it be measured by the person using its products, primarily Claude?. Claude’s download pace in the Apple App Store is just behind that of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The high valuation is more likely based on enterprise revenue. Venture Beat says Claude has taken the lead in business adoption. “Adoption of Anthropic rose 3.8% in April to 34.4% of businesses, according to the May 2026 release of the Ramp AI Index. OpenAI’s adoption fell 2.9% to 32.3%. Overall AI adoption among businesses rose 0.2 percentage points to 50.6%,” Venture Beat reports.

The comparisons between OpenAI and Anthropic leave out an incredibly important factor. Microsoft, Alphabet, DeepSeek, and Elon Musk’s xAI Grok are spending tens of billions of dollars on software development and hundreds of billions of dollars on AI data centers. The industry remains fragmented, and the cash war chests of each of these companies are staggering. Financial firms have also entered the race, providing capital for AI center buildouts.

While there are many reasons AI revenue will not rise quickly, one is that customers believe AI adoption is too far along at their companies, given the costs. Uber’s management recently said it was measuring AI costs against its productivity improvements. The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “Use of artificial intelligence by big companies is exploding—and the soaring cost has some of them pumping the brakes in a way that could complicate AI’s triumphal march across the economy.”

Anthropic’s valuation is based on both knowns and unknowns. That alone makes a nearly $1 trillion figure risky. At least Walmart has a proven track record.