Anthropic Prepares for $900 Billion Super Financing, CFO Deliberately Lowers Valuation
Anthropic is preparing for a round of super financing expected to exceed a valuation of $900 billion, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that first CFO Krishna Rao is using unconventional tactics.
Krishna Rao has repeatedly discouraged investors by stating "no financing yet," rejecting the highest valuations and opting to raise less money while providing conservative revenue forecasts; he joined Anthropic in May 2024 after securing $1 billion in emergency financing for Airbnb during the pandemic.
The explosive growth of Claude Code has driven April's annualized revenue rate to exceed $30 billion, and Rao must decide whether to lock in hundreds of billions in computing power contracts for 2027-2029 ahead of time; lowering valuations and expectations aims to avoid the burden of hardware depreciation due to revenue slowdowns after heavy investments.
Source: Public Information
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Krishna Rao was known as "Chairman Rao" during his time at Blackstone and famously won all of his boss's chips in a poker game by pretending to be a novice; before joining Anthropic, he served as head of corporate development at Airbnb, quickly securing $1 billion in financing during the pandemic in 2020, demonstrating his ability to make precise judgments under extreme pressure.
In terms of capital strategy, Rao is deliberately slowing down the financing pace and providing conservative guidance to reduce short-term dilution and reserve a buffer for future capital expenditures on computing power, while directing the rapidly growing cash flow from Claude Code towards long-term infrastructure commitments, avoiding financing difficulties similar to early AI companies that faced downturns after being overvalued.
Similar to Airbnb's capital restructuring path from the pandemic low to IPO, and OpenAI's high-valuation financing strategy during the same period, Anthropic is currently at the peak of its expansion from a tens of billions level to a trillion-dollar level, with the CFO acting as the practical executor and risk mitigator of Dario Amodei's philosophical leadership style.
Structural judgment: Essentially a form of capital concentration. The CFO actively lowers current valuations and expectations to guide hot money to a controllable pace, prioritizing the locking in of pricing power in the computing supply chain rather than maximizing short-term market value, thus avoiding heavy assets in hardware becoming liabilities amid AI cycle fluctuations, and driving the company's transition from financing-driven to infrastructure-led structure.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
When hot money is at its peak, refusal is the highest form of negotiation leverage.
Conservative forecasts sell time, while lowering valuations sells pricing power.
The CEO writes philosophy, the CFO manages the numbers; in the historical room, there is no balance, only adaptation.