The $2 trillion rests on a revenue curve the backers modelled — $47 billion annualized by May, with the year expected to close more than ten times where it began — and on no comparable listed company anywhere to check it against.
Investors in Anthropic expect the company to be worth $2 trillion or more once it lists in October, a price that would push past the SpaceX offering to rank as the biggest IPO ever recorded.
Anthropic has said little about what it earns since a confidential filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. The models the backers built rest on a revenue curve. Annualized revenue reached $47 billion by May, from customers who use Claude to write code and to handle both work duties and everyday chores, and backers expect the annual run rate to end the year more than ten times where it started. Rapidly accelerating demand for the company's advanced models, investors argue, is what justifies those expectations for the autumn listing.
Institutional investors have put close to $100 billion into Anthropic over the course of this year, venture capital houses and state-run wealth funds among them, lifting what the company was worth to $965 billion in May — the first occasion on which it had been valued above OpenAI.
What the modelling lacks is an anchor. Anthropic has no directly comparable publicly listed US company for investors to benchmark it against. Elsewhere in the sector, AI-focused companies such as Palantir and Nebius have traded this year at roughly 55 times their revenue, and one investor argued that if Anthropic is growing 800 percent a year, even a conservative multiple of 30 times revenue would make it a $3 trillion company.
The bullishness holds against real friction. Anthropic faces stiffer Chinese rivals, mounting pressure to bring artificial intelligence under regulation, and strained dealings with the US government. During the opening days of June the Trump administration curbed exports of two Anthropic models, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and the pace of revenue growth slackened that month as a result. Growth metrics have reportedly staged a strong recovery since those restrictions were eased.
A Notre Dame law professor who studies IPOs said the pace of Anthropic's move toward a listing took investors aback, most of them having expected OpenAI to go public first. He has asked whether the lofty prices investors are handing over for stakes in AI firms line up with what those firms are genuinely worth and what they deliver commercially.