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."