Key facts
- Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy said he would buy more Anthropic stock if he could.
- Murphy said investors should wait for Anthropic's S-1 filing before judging the business.
- Leaked financials obtained by Reuters showed Anthropic with $8 billion in operating losses last year.
- Murphy said infrastructure including compute, inference and routing made up roughly 60% to 70% of Menlo's AI investments.
- Murphy named OpenAI as the most overhyped company when asked at the event.
- Most attendees at the Tech Insider event said they would not buy Anthropic stock at a $3 trillion valuation.
Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy, an early investor in Anthropic, said at a Tech Insider event on November 10, 2026 that he would buy more of the AI lab's stock if he could, according to a report published November 11, 2026. Murphy dismissed leaked financials obtained by Reuters showing Anthropic recorded $8 billion in operating losses last year, saying investors should wait for the company's S-1 filing before judging the business.
Menlo has invested in every Anthropic round since 2023. The report said that if Anthropic's listing goes well, Menlo's estimated $1 billion investment could be worth around $25 billion at a $2 trillion valuation.
Murphy pushed back on the idea that Chinese open-weight models are poised to commoditize the biggest AI labs. He said the market has moved beyond experimentation into optimization, with companies focused on cutting costs, post-training models and routing work to the right system. Menlo has bet on that infrastructure layer, which Murphy said has accounted for roughly 60% to 70% of the firm's AI investments.
Asked about finding the next Anthropic, Murphy said: "I don't think there's going to be another Anthropic." He called neo-labs and robotics "super interesting" but warned that some startups are raising $100 million or billion-dollar rounds before showing much real traction. Asked which company was most overhyped, he named OpenAI.
The Tech Insider audience was less bullish on Anthropic. When asked how many would invest at a $3 trillion valuation, most said they would not buy. The head of Washington University's endowment, in comments last month at a conference of chief investment officers in Fort Worth, Texas, warned that AI labs face trouble from Chinese model competition. Early OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla told the reporter he strongly disagrees, citing a cost advantage in chips and data centers.