The Check Size Problem Behind Anthropic's Trillion-Dollar Valuation
A banker claims AI cut his costs 50% and tripled his deal speed. He has not published those numbers. So he listed his house for Anthropic shares instead.
Storm Duncan says deploying Claude Code at his investment bank cut costs in half and tripled his deal throughput. He has not published those numbers. He has not had them audited. That absence is the actual story.
Duncan, founder of Ignatious, a tech M&A boutique, says automating code reviews and deal analysis with Anthropic's AI coding tool produced a 50 percent reduction in operating costs and a threefold increase in how many transactions his small team can close, according to Business Insider. The figures are unaudited. Duncan is not a researcher — he is a banker who makes money on deals, not on publishing results. If his numbers hold, they are rare first-person evidence that frontier AI coding tools produce measurable ROI at small professional services firms. If they do not, they are a financial operator using an AI narrative to justify an equity trade. Nobody has checked.
Three months after making those claims, Duncan listed his 13-acre Mill Valley estate — infinity pool, San Francisco views, roughly 20 minutes from Anthropic's offices — not for cash but for Anthropic shares. He is covering closing costs himself. He has received multiple responses, including from Anthropic employees with shares to sell, according to Business Insider. He has structured the deal so any counterparty retains 20 percent of future upside before transferring the shares, according to NewsBytes.
"Anthropic can't spend time with people like me," Duncan told Business Insider. "They're looking for people who can write $100 million in a single check."
The gap between what Duncan claims AI did for his firm and what he has to do to buy more AI equity points to a structural problem. Three months ago, Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion post-money valuation, according to Reuters. It is not currently raising another round. The primary market is closed to new investors. The secondary market — where existing shareholders trade with each other — is the only venue, and whoever holds shares sets the price.
That price has moved well beyond the primary. Glen Anderson, CEO of Rainmaker Securities, a firm that facilitates secondary transactions, said he received an offer to buy Anthropic shares at a $960 billion valuation — a price he called unthinkable a month ago. "We get an offer, and then within a day someone else has already bought it," he told Business Insider, with corroboration from independent outlets including AOL and Tom's Hardware. Ken Sawyer, cofounder of Saints Capital, a venture secondary firm, said one Anthropic shareholder offered to unload shares at a $1.15 trillion valuation, Business Insider reported. Bradley Horowitz, a general partner at Wisdom Ventures and an early investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, said his firm receives daily offers it does not open. "We barely open those emails because we are not interested. We are playing a long game," he told Business Insider, with corroboration from multiple independent outlets. Shares are pricing at approximately $1 trillion on Forge Global's private marketplace exchange, according to Business Insider citing Forge Global CEO Kelly Rodriques.
Real-estate advisors have pegged Duncan's property at roughly $8 million; Business Insider cites $4.8 million. Both figures appear in reporting without a settled valuation.
The mechanism Duncan is using — identifying an employee willing to sell, acquiring their shares at secondary-market prices, and structuring the trade so the seller keeps an upside participation — is not unique to him. But the combination of a banker who claims AI productivity gains and is now converting real estate into AI equity is a specific kind of signal: someone with capital, existing ownership, and a narrative about what frontier AI can do is finding that conventional channels to increase his position are closed. The workaround is the data point.
Anthropic is reported to be exploring a public debut as early as late 2026, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan advising, according to Reuters. Until then, the secondary market is the only venue, and whoever holds shares sets the terms.
