Is SK Telecom or Zoom the better Anthropic proxy right now?
.. and a few other creative options
Companies stay “private for longer”—a gigantic understatement and a scandal in my opinion. Nevertheless, this is where we are. I’m ready and waiting to be their exit liquidity. These ideas have an expiration date, probably this fall. They are ranked from respectable to tell-no-one.
The biggest problem here is the circularity. Is the current market cap $7.5b core + $7.5b of recognized Anthropic, or is it $13b core (due to the idiosyncratic developments of the company) and $2.5b Anthropic? If it’s the former, then the company is a purer proxy so you get more direct delta exposure if you just want to be an investor at the current $1.5T whisper valuation. If it’s the latter, then there’s more “deep value” to be unlocked when the position is finally revealed after the IPO. I guess both are bullish for different reasons.
The Hyperscalers
Let’s get this out of the way first. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have been aggressive investors in frontier labs from the very beginning and have been adding along the way.
TL;DR: These stakes are a nice kicker to already great investments that also cause earnings surprises, but they are not a proxy. Maybe if Anthropic 5x’s one day.
Amazon: 20% stake, 5% of market cap
~$8b in since 2023, plus another $5b in early 2026 with a commitment for up to $20b more.
Stake is 15-21% fully diluted but Amazon hasn’t disclosed the full figure
Stake is worth $135-160b at the $965b mark, which is only 5–6% of Amazon’s ~$2.65T market cap
Alphabet: 15% stake, 3% of market cap
~$3b in + $40b more committed in April 2026 ($10b upfront at a ~$350b mark + $30b with milestones). Started with $300M back in early 2023.
Stake: ~14% fully diluted, likely ~15% now
Drove nearly half of Alphabet’s $62.6B Q1 2026 profit
At the $965b valuation, stake is approx $135–145b. This is only ~3% of Alphabet’s ~$4T+ market cap
Single Stock Proxies
Now on to my favorite option. There are various companies that have made venture style investments in Anthropic. Let’s look at the top two.
SK Telecom: 0.5% stake, ~50% (?) of market cap
This is one of my favorite investment ideas over the past 6 months. SKM 0.00%↑ was a telecom similar to the AT&T of Korea, mature and regulated. In recent years it has aggressively attempted to re-invent itself as an applied AI company and AI investor.
Here are some tidbits:
It has been through some things such as a major hack
The hack saga seems to be over and the company has started to recover financially (confounding variable)
It is part of an opaque family conglomerate structure known as a chaebol
We don’t know precisely how much of Anthropic is owned but estimates from analysts and the media are centered around 0.3-0.7%
Is subject to Korean currency risk
Is caught up in the speculative fury of the Korean retail market
Is subject to Strait of Hormuz impact as the country has a lot of energy exposure
There are all sorts of discounts applied to any embedded stake due to opacity, lack of clarity on shareholder returns, tax complications, reinvestment risk, etc.
There are other things going on with the company such as completed acquisitions and other programs to unlock value that confound pinning down the “look through”
All the uncertainties aside, the three hard parts are a) ascertaining their current fully diluted stake, b) guestimmating the relative allocation of market cap to this stake vs everything else now that other people have noticed, and c) forecasting where Anthropic will be after the IPO. Let’s take a closer look. First, the stake, which is disputed but a bit more objective.
Now what is this stake worth:
Thinking out loud: SKM was trading @ $20 for a $7.5b market cap before Anthropic went parabolic and now trades at about $40 or $15b market cap.. so if you SWAG $7.5b for the core business and 7.5b for the stake, 0.5% * 1.5 trillion = $7.5b, back of napkin checks out for this being a 50% (and growing) proxy for Anthropic. Presumably, if Anthropic makes it to $3T post-IPO you would see upside of 50% in SKM. This is just my mental math.
The biggest problem here is the circularity. Is the current market cap $7.5b core + $7.5b of recognized Anthropic, or is it $13b core (due to the idiosyncratic developments of the company) and $2.5b Anthropic? If it’s the former, then the company is a purer proxy so you get more direct delta exposure if you just want to be an investor at the current $1.5T whisper valuation. If it’s the latter, then there’s more “deep value” to be unlocked when the position is finally revealed after the IPO. I guess both are bullish for different reasons.
Example expression: debit spreads 35/55 in September or January.
Zoom: 0.33% stake, 18% (?) of market cap
Zoom is a little bit cleaner and simpler, but I was concerned the stake was too small.
Tidbits:
Invested $51m in May 2023 @ $4.5b valuation
Topped up ~$46m in early 2026
The concrete fact that we need is the 10-Q which marks the stake at $1.3b against Anthropic’s $380b round. We can do the math directly: 0.33%
The rest of it is clean.. mature biz growing 3% a year, $8b in cash, buybacks, etc.
It was $84 last fall and $94 now… cherry picked to be before Anthropic went parabolic with Claude Code and after the Iran war recovery.
Similar circularity issue as before.. but if we assume investors already see the 0.33% and price it at $1.5T, that would be about $5b of a $27b market cap, or ~18%.
I think this just might be a bit too dilute to do the trick. Might be a good deep value play for someone but I want raw deltas.
Hyperliquid
One of the more interesting and direct ways is perpetual futures against tokens that track the market cap of pre-IPO companies.
The tokens themselves track an “Oracle” of private valuations that in turn are turned into a futures market. These particular futures provide 3x leverage on posted margin. There are a lot of complications:
Hyperliquid is not technically accessible to US investors and to try to access it is a violation of their terms of service. Any workarounds would be technical and carry their own risks.
I’ve heard these are crowded trades, so there is a high cost to carry them known as the “funding rate”
Possible liquidity issues, volatility, issues with the Oracle used, etc.
“Perhaps with just 3x leverage I could avoid being liquidated?”
“Perhaps I could set up an AWS instance and vibe code access to the DEX directly?”
Perhaps that’s all a bit too much.
P.S. Investing in the HYPE token itself, treasury companies that accumulate it ($PURR) and the related HYPE ETFs is a popular thing as well right now as folks are using Hyperliquid for price discovery of pre-IPO companies and things like oil during the Strait of Hormuz crisis when normal futures markets are closed.
Prediction Markets
One creative idea is to synthesize a long position by making a series of binary bets on relevant prediction markets.
This is likely not a serious idea due to lack of liquidity, access, and myriad other issues, but it’s a fun thought exercise.
What other creative ways have you seen and heard? Would love to hear from some skeptics as well.