The expected figure

Half a dozen of the company's backers told the Financial Times that Anthropic's planned October float could come at a valuation of $2 trillion or more. A listing at that level would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab's debut the largest-ever initial public offering.

The investors' basis is the company's rapidly rising revenue. According to those sources, the Claude maker's annualised revenue is expected to reach between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026. The measure used is the startup's preferred one, which infers full-year sales from recent performance. That would be an increase of more than ten times over the course of 2026. One investor in the group put it this way: if Anthropic is growing 800 percent a year, at the incredibly low end you would expect it to trade at 30 times revenue, which would make it a $3 trillion company.

The comparison problem

The weakest point in a valuation of this kind is the lack of a benchmark. Anthropic has no publicly listed US peer that would provide one. Investors fill that gap with companies seen as AI beneficiaries: the data intelligence group Palantir and the cloud company Nebius have traded this year at roughly 55 times revenue.

According to the sources, senior Anthropic executives have yet to fix a valuation target for the IPO, even in private conversations. Investors have built their own financial models, so what exists is a set of expectations rather than a figure the company has stated.

The risks against the optimism

These bullish projections continue despite mounting challenges. The headline items in the picture Ars Technica reports are:

  • rising competition from Chinese rivals,
  • pressure for AI regulation,
  • and a simmering feud with the US government.

Among those concerns, the Commerce Department's temporary ban on Anthropic's best models in particular contributed to overall revenue growth slowing in the month of June, according to two investors with knowledge of the matter. Even so, the same sources say the company rebounded and continued to grow at an extraordinary rate even by Silicon Valley standards.

Why it matters

A listing at this level concerns more than Anthropic. A transaction that could unlock billions of dollars in gains for the five-year-old company's early investors would also test public markets that are growing more nervous about the AI boom. Until now these valuations have formed in private markets, through the models of a limited set of investors; a public listing means the price is set for the first time by a broad body of buyers.

The company led by Dario Amodei filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, putting it in a quiet period that limits public announcements about its financial performance. Anthropic declined to comment. Every figure here therefore rests on investor statements rather than data the company has confirmed.

The timing of the listing adds a further layer. The quiet period limits the company's ability to defend its own numbers publicly, so until October the debate will run largely on investor statements and models built from outside. The size of the gap between expectation and the price that actually forms will be an indicator not only for Anthropic but for the listing plans of the other AI companies expected to follow.