Zoom’s Anthropic Stake provides a free call option.

The Anthropic stake is an embedded call option. The options market is offering this for free on top of a business with a floor at the March lows. The chart is something most traders can agree on as a long above 95.

You can exploit a mispricing in the options market. The market is not yet ready for a scenario where traders are piling into anything and everything with an iota of Anthropic exposure. By cutting below 95, you create your own leverage on this trade.

Zoom invested $51M into Anthropic's Series C in May 2023, at a $4.5B valuation. That was ~1.13% pre-dilution. The stake has been diluted somewhere into the 0.57%-1.13% range. Midpoint 0.85%. Pick where you want to land on that spectrum. Personally I don't think it matters much since this is more of a momentum play aiming to take advantage of market behavior but let's entertain the numbers anyway.

Anthropic's current valuation is $380B (Series G, February 2026). At today's mark Zoom has:

• Heavy dilution (0.57%): $2.2B
• Midpoint (0.85%): $3.2B
• No dilution (1.13%): $4.3B

ZM market cap is currently $30B. Cash is $7.8B. Net out the cash and the midpoint stake and you're paying $19B for $2B of Free Cash Flow. In situations like this, you have to be very very careful or know what you are doing if betting on the underlying business itself. The market is likely sniffing out something about future growth. But the floor on this thing is in place.

We also know Anthropic is getting ready for a round at $900B. Yesterday SemiAnalysis (Dylan Patel) said Anthropic's ARR has reportedly hit $44B+, up from $30B in their last update, with inference gross margins going from 38% to 70%+. Take it with a grain of salt, but Dylan has so far been ahead of the curve. Yes I know the number is derived from a small sample size and is annualized.