Claude gets cheaper on one point, while $2 trillion IPO rumors meet criticism

The headlines make it sound as if Claude is becoming 75 percent cheaper in general. That is not quite right. According to the sources I have found, the cut applies only to one specific part of the price.

What has become cheaper?

Anthropic launched Claude 5.1, and here the price for reading cached information ("cached tokens") has been cut by 75 percent. It drops from $1 to $0.25 per million tokens. A token is a small piece of text that the model computes in.

Caching means the model can reuse something it has already read instead of reading it from scratch every time. According to Anthropic's head of product, precisely that step can account for half of usage or more in long, complex tasks. According to the source, it has been a sore point for customers.

The regular price is unchanged from Claude 5: $10 per million tokens for what you send in and $50 for what the model answers. The price for writing to the cache is also the same.

For ordinary chat users, this hardly changes anything. It is first and foremost companies building AI agents and automated workflows that can save money.

IPO rumors

At the same time, several media outlets report that investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of at least $2 trillion. That would be the largest IPO ever, above SpaceX, which according to coverage listed in June at $1.77 trillion. In May, Anthropic was valued at $965 billion.

The figure comes from investors' own models, not from Anthropic. According to the Financial Times, top management has not set a valuation target, not even internally.

One investor argues that if growth is 800 percent a year, the company would at the low end trade at 30 times revenue. Others are skeptical about whether the company can earn enough to justify the price. That is the background for some calling the figure ridiculous.

Anthropic has reported revenue of $11.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026, according to one of the sources.