Anthropic intends to tell investors that the opportunity it is chasing is worth upward of $30 trillion, a figure the Wall Street Journal made public ahead of the company's stock market debut.
The figure sizes the whole market Anthropic could sell into. Reaching it in a year would take one company winning every customer in it.
SpaceX set out $28.5 trillion in a May filing before selling shares in June, $26.5 trillion of it attributed to AI-related opportunities, and billed that market as the biggest any business had ever been in a position to pursue. Wall Street doubted a number that large, since no earlier IPO estimate had come near it.
Earlier listings claimed far less. Uber put the opportunity in front of it at $6 trillion when it went public in 2019, adding up the value of every mile people travel worldwide, by car or by public transport. WeWork cited $3 trillion, then scrapped the listing it had lined up.
The 191 technology firms in the S&P 1500 brought in $2.4 trillion between them last year, which is what listed US tech actually collects. Anthropic's market runs more than twelve times that.
Estimates of this kind are routine before a listing, assembled out of sector statistics, models drawn up by bankers, and guesses about how demand will develop. For an AI company the exercise is harder, because how far the technology will reach into programming, customer service, finance and health care is not settled.
Gary Marcus called the figure a fantasy in his Marcus on AI newsletter, and said that unless Anthropic scales back its IPO expectations, the listing is going to be a trainwreck.
Anthropic's own revenue is a separate figure, and a far smaller one. The company brought in $11.6 billion in the second quarter — the first time it has out-sold OpenAI.
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