Key Notes
- Investors expect Anthropic to seek a valuation of $2 trillion or more in a planned October IPO, per the FT citing six backers, which would be the largest public listing ever.
- The optimism rests on revenue: backers project annualized revenue of $100-120 billion by year-end, up more than tenfold from the start of 2026.
- Anthropic executives have not set a valuation target, the company is in an SEC-mandated quiet period and declined to comment.
Investors expect Anthropic to pursue a valuation of $2 trillion or more in a planned October initial public offering, which would make it the largest stock-market debut in history, the Financial Times reported. Six of the company’s backers told the paper that Anthropic’s rapid revenue growth could support a valuation more than double its most recent level.
Such a figure would eclipse SpaceX, which went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation in June, and would roughly double the $965 billion post-money valuation Anthropic reached in May, when it overtook OpenAI for the first time.
A crucial caveat runs through the reporting: these expectations come from investors, not from Anthropic. The company’s senior executives have not fixed a valuation target even in private conversations, according to the FT, prompting some backers to build their own financial models. Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC in June, is now in a quiet period that limits what it can say, and declined to comment.
The optimism rests almost entirely on revenue growth. Backers project Anthropic’s annualized revenue will reach between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026, more than ten times its level at the start of the year. The company reported crossing $47 billion in annualized revenue in May, though the picture is not uniform: the research firm IDC estimates Anthropic’s annualized revenue at a lower $40 billion to $50 billion, with consumer subscriptions contributing under $2 billion.
Much of Anthropic’s strength lies in the enterprise market, where its Claude models and Claude Code coding tool have captured a growing share of higher-value business customers, even though its roughly 245 million monthly users trail the billion ChatGPT reached in May.
The Valuation Math and Its Champions
The bull case is straightforward arithmetic applied to extraordinary growth. One investor told the FT that a company growing at 800% a year would, even at a conservative 30-times-revenue multiple, be worth around $3 trillion, and noted that AI-adjacent names like Palantir and Nebius have traded near 55 times revenue this year.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer defended the number, arguing it is not a bubble if the revenue actually arrives. Confidence has been reflected in capital flows: institutional investors, venture firms and industry giants poured close to $100 billion into Anthropic in 2026, and it has struck major infrastructure deals, including up to $25 billion from Amazon and a $5 billion commitment from AMD for chip access, while exploring a roughly $36 billion debt package tied to Google chips.
Being first to market also matters, since OpenAI has reportedly pushed its own listing toward 2027, potentially leaving Anthropic to set the template for how public investors value a frontier AI lab.
The Case for Caution
The skeptical read is equally clear, and the risks are concrete. A $2 trillion debut would ask public investors to price in continued hypergrowth with almost no margin for disappointment, and public markets scrutinize companies far more harshly than private ones, particularly firms spending enormously on compute while chasing profitability.
Pricing is a specific vulnerability: Anthropic’s top model costs more than 2.5 times OpenAI’s flagship, and cheaper Chinese open-weight alternatives from Alibaba, Moonshot and DeepSeek can be run at a fraction of the cost, exactly as some customers begin limiting AI spending or shifting to cheaper models.
Anthropic also faces policy and legal headwinds, including an ongoing dispute with the Trump administration, a Defense Department label as a supply-chain risk, and the June export-control episode that briefly forced its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models offline and dented June revenue before what sources called an extraordinary rebound.
The debut lands amid broader market unease about whether AI spending will pay off, with the Magnificent Seven having shed trillions this year on those very doubts. Reaching the market first is an achievement, but it also means Anthropic will be the first to test how much public investors will pay for a company at the center of the AI boom, with the numbers so far coming from the people who most want the answer to be a high one.
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