Aswath Damodaran said his recent Anthropic post drew strong reactions, including thoughtful and productive pushback, emotional responses from people who love Anthropic or would not touch it, and criticism, especially on the cost of capital, that he said reflects a fundamental disconnect with market history, current market pricing and basic business sense. He said he plans to play devil’s advocate with his own valuation, examining his story inputs and ranking them by fragility to stress-test his value estimate and reinforce corporate finance first principles, then address feedback and what he takes away from it. In his valuation summary, he said equity value at $1.45 trillion is slightly lower than his prior estimate of $1.475 trillion after adjusting trailing 12-month revenue and operating income to include the just-leaked third quarter numbers. Replacing third quarter revenues from 2025 with third quarter revenues of 2026 raises base revenues, and because he still believes revenues for the coming twelve months will stay at his original estimate of about $100 billion, year 1 revenue growth was adjusted down to deliver that result. He said the reframing adds details and corrects errors that did not change his value estimate. On value per share, he said his share count, created by adding shares reported as outstanding in the balance sheet to restricted shares granted to employees, will change before the public offering as bankers adjust it to deliver a per share value they believe will make the company more “sellable.”