Anthropic is heading toward the largest IPO ever, at a possible $2 trillion valuation

[Skye Jacobs]

Bottom line: Anthropic is heading toward a possible October IPO, with many investors telling the Financial Times that they expect the company to reach a valuation of $2 trillion or more. That figure would make it the largest public offering on record and put the company at the top of a market that is becoming increasingly cautious about AI spending and valuations.

The expectations are driven by Anthropic's rapid revenue growth. Investors expect its annualized revenue to reach $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of 2026. Anthropic said in May that its annualized revenue had surpassed $47 billion.

"If Anthropic is growing 800% a year, you'd think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue]," one investor in the group told the Financial Times. "That would make them a $3 trillion company."

Anthropic has not set a public valuation target for the offering. Several investors said senior executives had not shared one privately, either. Still, backers have built their own models based on the company's enterprise sales growth and the performance of its AI systems.

The company has gained ground against OpenAI and Google this year. Its strategy has centered on business customers, with companies using Anthropic's models and tools in internal workflows and customer-facing products. Ramp data showed that Anthropic increased its share of US business spending on AI last month.

The same data points to a growing issue for the sector: companies are watching their AI bills more closely. Ramp analysts said businesses were "hitting their limit on AI spend" and shifting some workloads to cheaper systems.

Anthropic's top model costs more than two and a half times as much to use as OpenAI's flagship model, according to Artificial Analysis. Chinese open-weight models are considerably cheaper. That price gap matters as companies shift from pilots and small projects to large-scale deployments, where inference costs can rise quickly.

Some customers have already changed their approach. Rather than pushing employees to use the most capable AI tools whenever possible, they have moved certain tasks to lower-cost models. The shift does not necessarily mean demand for frontier systems is falling. It does mean companies are deciding more carefully which workloads require the highest-performing models.

Anthropic filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. The filing placed the company in a quiet period, limiting what it could say publicly about its financial results. Anthropic declined to comment on the planned offering.

The company has raised just under $100 billion from venture capital firms, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional investors in 2026. Its valuation reached $965 billion in May, including new investment, when it moved ahead of OpenAI for the first time.

But a public listing would come with risks that private investors have so far been willing to accept. Anthropic has faced pressure from the Trump administration and remains in litigation with the Defense Department, which labeled the company a supply-chain risk earlier this year.

The Commerce Department's export controls also forced Anthropic to briefly remove its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models in June. Two investors said the disruption slowed overall revenue growth that month and raised concerns among customers who relied on the models.

The company recovered after that period, according to the investors. Even so, the IPO will test whether public-market investors are willing to place a multitrillion-dollar valuation on an AI company that is growing quickly but operating in a market where pricing pressure, regulation, and competition are all increasing.

"It's easy to come up with challenges," said an Anthropic investor who has also backed AI groups including OpenAI and SpaceX, which went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation in June. "But the company continues to be in first position in performance, positioning and what people want exposure to."

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Anthropic is heading toward the largest IPO ever, at a possible $2 trillion valuation

 

[yRaz]

Well, we all saw how the spaceX IPO went. I do like Claude the most but I find myself using Gemini the most just because work pays for a base package. My job doesn't really pair with AI very well but it's helps for formating reports and excel documents. Maybe saves me 20 minutes a week and now it gives me a scape goat anytime there is a mistake. "Well you told me to try to use AI more."

 

[mbk34]

I'm not sure I'd want to invest. The AI industry as a whole smells like a bubble. Does it's income justify it's valuation? Is AI vulnerable to new ideas that might make existing techniques and hardware worthless. Requirements on water and energy which are getting increasingly costly. Communities rising up against data centres. The American economy looking increasingly delicate.

 

[umeng2002]

Oh... investors expect...

 

[Megalomaniac]

IPO are supposed to be after a company has proven to be profitable.

Now they are nothing more than Ponzi schemes to pay back the initial investors.

Space X is just the latest example of Elon Musk cvreating bag holders out of the fools who actually think we're going to Mars. Starlink is profitable but the Space division isn't.

 

[PXAbstraction]

Well, good luck if you choose to buy in I guess. Data so far (case in point, the SpaceX price) indicates to me not to go anywhere near companies tied to this bubble so I will be staying far away.

 

[NumberNine]

When this machine learning frenzy settles into something more sustainable than an arms race, when all the excitement and fomo are gone and the disruption appeal has faded... We will finally have reasonable pricing and new useful infrastructure which can be sustained without bribing local officials for land. Machine Learning isn't going away, but very few of the current "AI" companies, will survive the transition into mundane infrastructure. Anthropic is one of the most likely companies to exist on the other side of this.

Additionally, once the party has ended we'll be feasting like kings on the leftover hardware.

 

[Axeia]

Although I do feel like they're the best horse in this AI race to bet on by actually having a strong product/products and plans to turn it into those sweet dollars... personally, I still wouldn't invest in it.

Respect at least for having made it this far on their own strength.
They didn't have the media hype Open AI gets with AI messiah Sam Altman.
Not the clout/magic touch from Musk's promises.
Not Meta's endlessly deep pockets (not even the metaverse failure made them any less deep it seems).
Not Microsoft/Google (Alphabets) massive existing userbase and shoving it every existing product.

 

[RedGuard]

Ah, now it's time to take the money from the suckers.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

The key fact missing is what is the cost for Anthropic to make that $100B/year revenue?

They currently have the best AI models and business model, but how close they are to breakeven is crucial.

 

[wiyosaya]

Uh-Oh. fElon is going to be jealous. This will take all the attention away from him and his narcissistic head will explode!

<...> and now it gives me a scape goat anytime there is a mistake. "Well you told me to try to use AI more."

Perfect. I'll have to remember that if my company forces AI on us. So far, that hasn't happened, thankfully.

 

[pnntmp]

I think all projections of Anthropic's future growth and revenue should be drastically revised in the light of the recent Grok 4.6 release. It's faster, about 8x cheaper than Fable, and of comparable capability. In October, when the IPO is expected, Grok may be ahead. In any case, Anthropic will be forced to reduce their prices a lot.

It's also worth mentioning that roughly 1/3 of Anthropic's compute capacity is rented from SpaceX AI and can be taken away at any time with a 3 month notice.

For the IPO to be successful, Anthropic should categorically sideline Dario.
The temporary bump they got from Dario's preposterous theatrics with the DoW is long gone, but all the negative consequences remain if full effect. Potential investors must be ensured that can't happen again.

 

[yRaz]

The key fact missing is what is the cost for Anthropic to make that $100B/year revenue?

They currently have the best AI models and business model, but how close they are to breakeven is crucial.

If it wasn't for the billions of I'm just going to call "data center credit" then they wouldn't be able to function, neither would OpenAI. They're both burning through hundreds of billions a year. DCs are selling time on their hardware just so they don't sit idle and all the "profitable" AI businesses are entirely dependant on artificially cheap server time. The minute the same dollar keeps getting passed around it will all come falling down.

These "investments" these companies keep making in each other are also tied to a rate. That "$100billion investment" is tied to a number per unit of compute. People seem to be entirely ignoring that these companies aren't investing $100b. As an example, they're "investing" $25b of compute, saying it's worth $100b and then going to the bank saying "give us a loan based on these numbers".

The problem isn't as simple as these companies are posting weird revenue numbers or not making money. The problem is that numbers have been so fudged across so many spreadsheets that noone really actually knows what the real numbers actually are. They only people making money are nVidia, TSMC and the memory frauds.

And everyone is eventually going to end up packaging the massive debt and dump it on shadow companies/shell companies that file bankruptcy.