Anthropic investors eye $2T IPO valuation as revenue races to $120B

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Half a dozen Anthropic investors expect the Claude maker to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, a figure that would eclipse SpaceX and set a record as the largest initial public offering in history, according to a report published by Ars Technica citing the Financial Times.

The projection would more than double Anthropic’s current valuation of $965 billion - itself a milestone reached only in May, when the company surpassed OpenAI’s valuation for the first time after pulling in just under $100 billion in venture capital, sovereign wealth fund, and institutional investment during 2026 alone. At the same time, the company announced that its annualized revenue had already crossed $47 billion.

Revenue growth driving the bull case

The central argument from investors is straightforward: Anthropic’s revenue trajectory justifies a valuation that would have seemed absurd even twelve months ago. Backers project the company’s annualized revenue will land between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026 - a figure calculated using the startup’s preferred method of inferring full-year sales from recent performance - representing growth of more than 10 times over the course of the year.

At those growth rates, some investors believe even a conservative revenue multiple produces an enormous number. “If Anthropic is growing 800 percent a year, you’d think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue],” one investor told the Financial Times. “That would make them a $3 trillion company.”

For context, Anthropic has no direct publicly listed US peer against which to benchmark its valuation. Investors have instead pointed to companies seen as AI beneficiaries - data intelligence group Palantir and cloud provider Nebius - which have traded at roughly 55 times revenue in 2026. If Anthropic commanded a similar multiple against projected revenues, the implied valuation would dwarf even the $2 trillion figure investors are currently citing.

Several investors told the Financial Times that senior Anthropic executives had not yet fixed a valuation target, even in private discussions. The company filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, entering a quiet period that restricts public comment on financial performance. Anthropic declined to comment for the story.

Real risks beneath the optimism

The $2 trillion figure comes with a list of material concerns that investors acknowledge but have, so far, chosen to discount. The most acute episode arrived in June, when the US Commerce Department imposed export controls on Anthropic and labeled the company a supply-chain risk through the Department of Defense - an extraordinary designation for a domestic AI lab. The controls forced Anthropic to briefly withdraw its leading models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, from the market. Two investors with knowledge of internal figures said overall revenue growth slowed during the month of June as a result, and that the episode rattled customers who depend on Anthropic’s models for core business functions.

The company has since rebounded, those investors said, continuing to expand at what they described as an extraordinary rate even by Silicon Valley standards. But the standoff with the Trump administration is unresolved - Anthropic remains in active litigation against the Department of Defense, and its relationship with federal regulators remains strained.

Competitive pressure from Chinese AI rivals is another variable that investors cite as a risk. Anthropic has made measurable gains on OpenAI and Google this year, releasing models that have outperformed competitors on key benchmarks while tilting its commercial focus toward business customers. Whether it can sustain that technical edge as rivals close the gap is an open question that public market investors will have to price when the IPO arrives.

Customer price sensitivity is also rising. As the best frontier models become more capable, the cost of accessing them has become a more significant factor in purchasing decisions - a dynamic that could compress margins even as headline revenue grows.

What a $2 trillion listing would mean

A successful autumn float at or above the $2 trillion mark would do more than deliver returns for early backers - it would function as a referendum on whether public markets are prepared to absorb AI-era valuations at a scale never before attempted. The five-year-old company would debut larger than all but a handful of the most established corporations on earth, with a business model still heavily dependent on continued revenue acceleration and an unresolved regulatory dispute with its own government.

For the practical AI users - developers, small businesses, and enterprise teams - who depend on Anthropic’s models, the IPO’s outcome matters less for its financial theatrics than for what it signals about the company’s stability and its ability to keep its most capable tools available without interruption. The June export-control episode showed how quickly that availability can be threatened, and no amount of investor optimism changes the fact that Anthropic’s next chapter will be written partly in courtrooms as much as in data centers.

// read moreAnthropic Files for IPO as AI Listing Could Set a RecordNewsAnthropic Revenue Hits $65bn as Fable Model Fails to Gain TractionMagazineSundar Pichai: Google CEO Chasing AI Race He InventedMagazine

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