what you're buying into here is a company that is already large on the idea of growth over the next 10 years.
Modern IPO's just reek of investors cashing out
Google closed its first trading day "worth more than $25 billion" [1] with $1.5bn revenues, up 234% from 2002's $440mm [2]. That's a 16x revenue multiple, 0.07 growth adjusted [3].
On a similar revenue multiple, Anthropic's $16.3bn half-year earnings are worth $543 billion. Adjust for Anthropic's 1,400% YoY growth and you're well over $3 trillion.
Obviously, it's a lot harder to grow at a thousand percent from a $16bn baseline versus a few billion. But purely on a multiple basis, Anthropic is in a similar ballpark as Google.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/19/technology/shares-of-goog...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504...
99.9999% of the time someone sells something, the goal is to obtain cash. Throughout all of human history.