Anthropic is targeting a valuation of at least $2 trillion for an initial public offering in October, half a dozen of the AI lab's investors told the Financial Times, a figure that would surpass SpaceX's $1.77 trillion June debut and make the Claude maker's listing the largest-ever stock-market flotation.
The target would more than double the $965 billion valuation Anthropic reached in May, when its price tag leapfrogged OpenAI's for the first time. Reaching it would hand billions of dollars in gains to the five-year-old company's early backers and test whether public markets still have appetite for the AI trade.
The revenue case
Investors say the valuation is anchored in a projected step-change in revenue. Anthropic's annualized sales — a measure that infers full-year revenue from recent performance — are expected to reach $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of 2026, up more than tenfold over the year, the FT report said. The company disclosed in May that its annualized revenue had passed $47 billion.
"If Anthropic is growing 800 percent a year, you’d think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue]," one of the investors told the FT. "That would make them a $3 trillion company." Publicly traded AI beneficiaries such as Palantir and cloud group Nebius have traded this year at about 55 times revenue, the paper said.
Anthropic filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, entering a quiet period that limits what its executives can say about the numbers.
An IPO wave
The Anthropic float would land in the middle of the largest wave of AI-related public offerings the industry has produced. SpaceX, which merged with Elon Musk's xAI in February, went public in June at a $1.77 trillion valuation. OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, is preparing its own listing as soon as this fall, according to the Associated Press.
"These companies are now burning through cash to win the AI race, and public equity is the cheapest source available, particularly in a rising interest rate environment," Michael Field, chief equity analyst at Morningstar, told the AP.
Vertical integration
Anthropic has also begun assembling an in-house silicon team, the company confirmed to Business Insider and TechCrunch, joining OpenAI, Google, Meta and Mistral in designing custom chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia. A company spokesperson said Anthropic will still take a "multi-chip approach," using hardware from other suppliers alongside its own designs.
Caveats
The bull case runs against real friction. The Commerce Department temporarily banned Anthropic's top models in June under new export controls, and investors told the FT that the episode slowed revenue growth that month before it rebounded. Anthropic remains in active litigation with the U.S. Department of Defense, which labeled the company a supply-chain risk earlier this year. Anthropic's flagship model costs more than two and a half times as much as OpenAI's, according to Artificial Analysis, and payments firm Ramp said last month that business customers were "hitting their limit on AI spend" and shifting to cheaper alternatives, including Chinese open-weight rivals.
No federal regulator or independent equity analyst publicly challenged the reported target in the wire reports, and Anthropic itself is barred by the SEC quiet period from responding.
Anthropic's senior executives had not fixed a valuation target even in private conversations as of the FT report, several investors told the paper, meaning the number that appears in the October prospectus could still move.