Anthropic races toward record $2 trillion IPO as revenue run rate soars to $65 billion

Anthropic revenue run rate tops $65 billion, source says

Aug 17 (Reuters) - Anthropic's annual revenue run rate topped $65 billion by the end of July, a person familiar with the matter said on Monday, underscoring the Claude creator's rapid growth ahead of a potential public listing later this year. The AI startup's latest revenue run rate -- a metric that projects annual performance by extrapolating current sales levels -- was up from the $47 billion ⁠in May and an extraordinary jump from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. The company had shared the latest figure with investors as part of ongoing financial updates, the person said. Bloomberg first reported the development earlier on Monday. Here are more details: Reporting by Anzar Mehraj in Bengaluru and Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Leroy Leo Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Anthropic investors bet on $2tn valuation in record IPO

Anthropic investors expect the AI start-up to float at a valuation of $2tn or more in October, a dizzying figure that would vault SpaceX to make the AI lab's debut the largest ever initial public offering. Half a dozen of the company's backers told the FT that Anthropic's rapidly rising revenue would enable it to more than double its current valuation in a planned autumn float. A listing at that level could unlock billions of dollars in gains for the five-year-old company's early investors but would also test public markets that are becoming more nervous about the AI boom. Anthropic's backers say booming demand for the lab's advanced AI models and tools justifies their lofty expectations. Investors expect the Claude maker's annualised revenue to be between $100bn and $120bn by the end of 2026 -- using the start-up's preferred measure, which infers full-year sales from recent performance -- up by more than 10 times over the course of 2026. "If Anthropic is growing 800 per cent a year, you'd think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue]," said one investor in the group. "That would make them a $3tn company." Anthropic lacks a publicly listed US peer that would provide a benchmark for its valuation. But companies that are seen as AI beneficiaries, such as data intelligence group Palantir and cloud company Nebius, have traded this year at roughly 55 times revenue. Several investors said senior Anthropic executives had yet to fix the valuation target for the IPO, even in private conversations. But investors have built their own financial models. Their bullish projections come despite mounting challenges, including rising competition from Chinese rivals, pressure for AI regulation and a simmering feud with the US government. Those concerns, particularly the commerce department's temporary ban on Anthropic's best models, contributed to overall revenue growth slowing in the month of June, according to two investors with knowledge of the matter. Even so, they said the company had rebounded and continued to grow at an extraordinary rate even by Silicon Valley standards. Anthropic declined to comment. The start-up led by Dario Amodei filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, putting the company in a quiet period that limits public announcements about its financial performance. Anthropic has gained ground on rivals OpenAI and Google this year, releasing models that have outperformed competitors while focusing on sales to business customers. The group announced in May that its annualised revenue had surpassed $47bn. Venture capitalists, sovereign wealth funds and other institutional investors have poured just under $100bn into the company in 2026. Anthropic's valuation leapfrogged OpenAI's for the first time in May, reaching $965bn including the new investment. But the group also faces considerable uncertainty. It has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration and remains in active litigation against the US Department of Defense, which labelled Anthropic a supply chain risk earlier this year. Anthropic has since been forced to briefly pull its leading models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after being hit with export controls by the commerce department in June. The episode spooked some customers who rely on Anthropic models. Customers are also increasingly sensitive to the price of accessing the best models. Faced with spiralling costs, they have in some cases reversed directives for employees to maximise their AI use and opted for less powerful, cheaper models. Anthropic's market-leading model costs more than two and a half times as much to use as OpenAI's flagship, according to Artificial Analysis, which analyses AI models. Chinese open-weight alternatives, which have also improved dramatically this year, are a fraction of the cost, according to Artificial Analysis. Anthropic increased its market share among US businesses last month, according to data from payments group Ramp. But analysts at the company found businesses were "hitting their limit on AI spend" and turning to cheaper alternatives. "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 $1.77tn valuation in June. "But the company continues to be in first position in performance, positioning and what people want exposure to." Additional reporting by Zijing Wu and Ivan Levingston

Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao is leading early IPO meetings with investors and has not discussed valuation, sources say

* Anthropic's early investor meetings ahead of a potential IPO have been high-level and have not included discussions about specific financials, sources told CNBC's David Faber. * CFO Krishna Rao is leading the meetings, the people said. * The meetings have focused on topics like its Claude AI models, the development of Claude Code, its management and more. In this article * ANTHR.FG Follow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT watch now VIDEO2:2902:29 Anthropic not discussing financials in early IPO investor meetings Squawk on the Street Anthropic's early meetings with prospective investors ahead of its potentially historic IPO have been high-level and have not included discussions about specific financials or a valuation, sources told CNBC's David Faber. The artificial intelligence company confidentially filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, setting the stage for its highly-anticipated public markets debut. The company has not disclosed an official timeline for when it plans to IPO, but it has been holding preliminary meetings to test the waters with some investors in recent weeks. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao is leading the meetings, the people said. In those meetings, Anthropic has discussed big-picture topics like its family of Claude AI models, how the company developed its popular coding assistant Claude Code, its position in the enterprise market, its management and the number of releases it has executed, the people said. A representative for Anthropic did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of researchers and executives who defected from OpenAI, now the company's chief rival. In late May, Anthropic closed a funding round at a $965 billion valuation, topping OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion in late March. Read more CNBC tech news The company is best known for its cutting-edge Claude models, and it's found success selling its technology to large enterprises -- a fiercely competitive market for AI developers. Anthropic said in May that its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion, up from the roughly $10 billion in revenue that it generated in all of 2025. Because of its anticipated run rate, some Anthropic investors expect that the company could seek a valuation of $2 trillion or more, according to two sources familiar with the matter. But that number is based on their own analyses and is not a figure that is coming from Anthropic, the sources said. The Financial Times was first to report that investors were floating the $2 trillion expectation. OpenAI is also gearing up for a potentially massive IPO. The company confidentially filed its prospectus with regulators shortly after Anthropic did, but as of late June, it had not held pre-IPO meetings or outlined an official timeline for the listing, as CNBC previously reported. Elon Musk's SpaceX, which acquired his AI startup xAI earlier this year, made a record-breaking debut on the Nasdaq in June. The stock has had a volatile first two months of trading, and is off roughly 38% from its intra-day high. -- CNBC's Kate Rooney contributed to this report watch now VIDEO2:3302:33 Riot signs $9.1 billion Anthropic deal TechCheck Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Anthropic is heading toward the largest IPO ever, at a possible $2 trillion valuation

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. 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."

Anthropic's revenue run rate tops $65bn, a source says, but a run rate is not revenue

The AI lab has reportedly told investors its annualised revenue run rate climbed above $65bn by the end of July. Anthropic has told investors that its annualised revenue run rate topped $65bn by the end of July, according to a person familiar with the company's finances who was cited by Reuters. The distinction matters as a run rate takes revenue from a recent, short window, often a single month, and multiplies it out to a full year as though that pace held steady for twelve months. It is a snapshot annualised, not audited annual revenue. Anthropic's preliminary second-quarter revenue of more than $11.5bn works out closer to a $46bn annualised pace, so the $65bn figure implies that July alone was running far hotter than the quarter before it. That may well be true given the trajectory, but it rests on the steepest, most recent slice of the curve. The provenance deserves the same caution. The headline number comes from an unnamed source rather than a formal disclosure, and Anthropic has not published it. Bloomberg, which reported on related financial documents, noted the company declined to comment. For a firm preparing to sell shares to the public, figures shared selectively with investors are worth treating as directional rather than definitive. Context does make the growth look real, even if the precise total is fuzzy. Anthropic's run rate sat at roughly $9bn at the end of 2025, passed $30bn early this year, and reached about $47bn in May, so a further climb over the summer fits the pattern rather than breaking from it. The company has said its second-quarter revenue rose more than fourteenfold year on year, and it has reported positive adjusted operating income and positive operating cash flow for the period, a rare claim among frontier labs that mostly burn cash at speed. The number also lands as a competitive marker. A $65bn run rate would sit well above the roughly $40bn run rate OpenAI has recently described, though the two do not necessarily measure revenue the same way, which makes any head-to-head shakier than it looks. Both are racing to turn enterprise adoption of their models into durable, high-margin income rather than one-off usage spikes, and both have an incentive to frame their momentum generously in the same breath as they raise money. A run rate is an easy metric to lead with precisely because it flatters the most recent, fastest month, and investors on both sides know to read it that way. All of this is happening against an IPO backdrop that raises the stakes on every figure. Anthropic has filed confidentially for a public listing, with an offering reported for as early as the autumn and a roster of banks lining up to run it. It has also been reported to be eyeing a valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars, a level that only makes sense if revenue keeps compounding near this pace. Numbers shared with investors in that window are, by their nature, part of a pitch. None of this means the growth is not happening. Claude's traction among developers and enterprises is well documented, and even the more conservative annualised reading of the second quarter would rank Anthropic among the fastest-scaling software businesses on record. The point is narrower. A $65bn run rate, attributed to a single source, drawn from the hottest recent month, and floated ahead of a share sale, is a headline to hold loosely until the company puts audited figures on the record. That reckoning is coming. An IPO forces disclosure, and a prospectus will replace anonymous run-rate briefings with numbers Anthropic has to stand behind. Until then, the honest summary is this: Anthropic is growing extraordinarily fast, the exact shape of that growth is still being described by people who are not speaking on the record, and $65bn is a run rate, not a receipt.

Anthropic Investors Think It's Worth $2 Trillion

Investors in Claude developer Anthropic are reportedly setting a $2 trillion target for its October IPO in an eye-watering and potentially risky play to set a record valuation. According to the Financial Times, "half a dozen" Anthropic investors confirmed the target valuation, citing the company's projections of $100 billion to $120 billion in revenue by the end of 2026. One claimed that $2 trillion was actually a lowball figure, given Anthropic's rate of expansion, and suggested $3 trillion "on the incredibly low side" instead. (A totally unbiased figure, we're sure.) "It's easy to come up with challenges," one investor told FT. "But the company continues to be in first position in performance, positioning and what people want exposure to." Anthropic itself has yet to settle on a number, FT reported, and there's conveniently no "publicly listed US peer" to compare the number against. So, this may be wishcasting. That said, it's not that much higher than SpaceX's $1.7 trillion IPO. While Elon Musk's rocket company briefly shot to around $3 trillion, shares have been wildly variable since and are currently hovering around the IPO price of $135 per. The company has had some hurdles as of late. In June, the White House freaked out about the release of frontier models Mythos 5 and Fable 5, forcing Anthropic to temporarily yank them from the public. Explanations have ranged from Fable 5 following a command to "fix this code" to a report that the models were capable of hacking into NSA and Cyber Command systems like it was nothing. While Anthropic has since released Fable 5, its cybersecurity-focused Mythos model remains restricted to a handful of security firms participating in a project to find and patch software flaws using the model before it's released. Anthropic recently claimed in a blog post that on three separate occasions, models undergoing testing (including Mythos) had broken out of their sandbox environments and launched attacks on real companies sharing the name of fictional targets. Incidentally, its customers have complained about too many guardrails. Another challenge, FT reported, is cost. It cited data from AI analytics firm Artificial Analysis that show Anthropic's models cost over 2.5x than rival OpenAI, and Chinese open-weight models are far cheaper to run than either. Building out AI infrastructure has also proven so expensive that the Federal Reserve has warned it could fuel inflation via its impacts on the electricity and computer hardware markets, CNBC recently reported. Companies have already begun to limit token use over cost concerns, and a recent Mavvrik/Benchmarkit poll showed as many as one in four have delayed or canceled AI projects due to cost. Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on this story, but we'll update if we hear back.

EXCLUSIVE: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200 billion 2028 revenue forecast, sources say

Aug 14 (Reuters) - As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, Wall Street is looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now. Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to two people familiar with the company's financials, a figure that has not previously been reported. The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue "run rate," reflecting the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite. Bankers and investors are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts, four sources said. Using revenue multiples is common for high-growth software companies that have yet to establish a mature profit profile. But looking two years ahead is less typical, reflecting the speed at which Anthropic's business is expanding and the challenges of setting benchmarks for a company still spending heavily to build out its AI infrastructure, the people said. The pace of spending on AI investment has been responsible for pullbacks in many of the most popular tech stocks in ⁠recent months, including some of the firms viewed as comparable to Anthropic. There have been precedents among some of the fastest-growing companies that hit the market recently. Backers of Cerebras Systems (CBRS.O), opens new tab cited 2028 revenue expectations in the runup to the firm's IPO this year, and SpaceX (SPCX.O), opens new tab projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June, the people said. The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing an AI company whose margins are still being pressured by enormous spending on computing power, model training and hiring. Investors are betting that as Anthropic grows, revenue will rise faster than the costs required to support that growth, allowing margins to expand. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. SEARCHING FOR COMPS Cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare (NET.N), opens new tab, enterprise software company Palantir (PLTR.O), opens new tab and Elon Musk's SpaceX are among the public companies being considered as reference points for Anthropic's valuation ahead of the company's analyst day, the people said. Public-market comparables are a crucial part of the IPO valuation process, giving investors a benchmark for how companies seen as having similar growth profiles and business models are valued. The peer group can also help determine which revenue or earnings multiples should be applied to a company's financial forecasts. Palantir is valued at 53 times this year's expected revenue, making it one of Wall Street's priciest stocks. SpaceX ⁠and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, LSEG data show. Each of the companies offers a different lens on Anthropic. Palantir has become a reference point for investors valuing businesses with rapid growth and exposure to AI. Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company, while SpaceX offers an example of a company valued in part on expectations for its future scale rather than its current financial profile. LOOKING PAST CURRENT EARNINGS Established companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings, or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the economics of the business. For Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale. Anthropic is spending enormous amounts on ⁠GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. Those expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but could become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows. The company's financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Anthropic's revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company, before rising to more than $47 billion by May. Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more ⁠than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million. The company has said its revenue run rate grew more than 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026. That growth is a key reason investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple. The valuation therefore rests on the expectation that Anthropic's current spending is funding a business that will eventually ⁠generate much higher revenue and margins. Training and inference could become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could become a smaller share of revenue as the company scales. "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time," said David Merkel, a principal at investment firm Aleph Investments. "Does it (AI) really produce so much additional productivity... These are just questions that we have to ask if we were thinking of pricing this, buying this." Reporting by Echo Wang in New York, editing by Colin Barr and Rosalba O'Brien Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence Echo Wang Thomson Reuters Echo Wang is a correspondent at Reuters covering U.S. equity capital markets, and the intersection of Chinese business in the U.S, breaking news from U.S. crackdown on TikTok and Grindr, to restrictions Chinese companies face in listing in New York. She was the Reuters' Reporter of the Year in 2020.

Anthropic's near-$2tn IPO rests on a revenue forecast for 2028

To justify a valuation that could brush $2tn, the AI lab is reportedly asking the market to underwrite a leap from about $47bn to roughly $200bn in revenue in barely two years. According to a Reuters exclusive, the AI lab's initial public offering hinges on an internal forecast that it will book between $190bn and $200bn of revenue in 2028, a previously unreported figure that bankers and investors are already leaning on to justify a price tag that could brush $2tn. The leap involved is the sort that only makes sense inside a boom. Anthropic's revenue run rate sat at roughly $47bn as of May 2026, up from about $9bn at the end of 2025, so the reported 2028 target implies revenue more than quadrupling again in a little over two years. The near-term numbers are, admittedly, moving fast. Second-quarter revenue for 2026 is projected to reach at least $10.9bn, more than double the previous quarter, and the company is said to be eyeing its first quarterly operating profit, a forecast figure of around $559m. For a lab that has spent most of its life burning cash, that would be a genuine inflection point, and it is the kind of trajectory that lets bankers argue the forecasts are not fantasy but extrapolation. Rather than pricing Anthropic on what it earns today, bankers are reportedly applying enterprise-value-to-revenue multiples to those 2028 forecasts, a two-years-forward approach that is rare in public markets but was used before the flotations of Cerebras and SpaceX. It is a method built for companies growing too quickly to value on the present tense. Palantir trades at roughly 53 times its expected 2026 revenue, while SpaceX and Cloudflare sit at around 41.6 times. Stretch multiples like those across Anthropic's projected 2028 haul and the eye-watering headline figures begin to look, if not sober, then at least internally consistent. The catch is that the whole calculation borrows heavily from the future, and it assumes the enthusiasm on display today survives long enough to meet the revenue it is pricing in. Not everyone is convinced they would hold. "Could they get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time," said David Merkel of Aleph Investments, neatly capturing the gap between what a hot market will pay on the day and what it will tolerate a year later. The caveat sits in the cost base. Heavy spending on GPUs, compute and model training is pressing on current margins, and the bull case rests on the assumption that those costs fall as a share of revenue as the business scales. If they do not, the two-years-forward logic starts to wobble, because the whole exercise trades present profitability for future size. The valuation talk has been climbing for months. Anthropic has already attracted investor offers at an $800bn valuation and been reported to be eyeing something closer to $900bn in a mooted $50bn round, with the IPO chatter now nudging toward the $2tn mark that once sounded fanciful. The wider risk is that the whole edifice depends on a forecast holding in a market that could turn. Cheaper rivals are already threatening the economics that underpin these valuations, and a two-years-forward multiple is only ever as good as the year it is pointed at. For now, the story is the sort that raises a European eyebrow: dazzling growth, real questions about margins, and a valuation resting almost entirely on a number nobody can yet check. Anthropic may well hit $200bn in revenue by 2028, and its recent run of results gives the ambition more credibility than it once had. But the market is being asked to price the company as though that arrival is already booked, and to do so two full years before the receipts come in.

Anthropic revenue surges to over $11.5 billion in second quarter | Fortune

Anthropic PBC is telling prospective investors its second-quarter revenue jumped at least 14-fold versus the same period a year ago, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News. The Claude chatbot maker reported a preliminary revenue figure of more than $11.5 billion in its latest completed quarter, compared to $787 million in the corresponding period in 2025, and $4.73 billion in the first quarter of this year, the documents show. The second quarter of 2026 saw Anthropic report positive adjusted operating income, according to the documents. Deliberations are ongoing and the figures could be revised. A representative for Anthropic declined to comment. The rapid growth comes as the company battles its longtime rival OpenAI to win over corporate customers. Once considered an underdog in the artificial intelligence race, Anthropic has seen a surge in professionals adopting its software to streamline tasks including coding. Anthropic's annualized revenue or run rate crossed $47 billion in May. OpenAI has an annual run rate of over $40 billion, Bloomberg News reported, though the two figures may not be calculated the same way. The company is meeting with investors ahead of its potential mega-IPO, people familiar with the matter said in July. Anthropic filed confidentially for a listing, and is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. on the IPO, Bloomberg News has reported. Anthropic is seeking to tap the public market's ample funding capacity to maintain its lead over OpenAI and others, as AI companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the most cutting-edge models. An IPO this fall would see Anthropic debut not only before OpenAI but also before DeepSeek, the Chinese AI firm that has been grabbing an increasing share of the market for the technology. DeepSeek is preparing for an IPO and could file as soon as this year, people familiar with the matter have said. The AI race has fired up the IPO market, with listings this year raising $256.4 billion, excluding blank-check firms and other financial vehicles, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That's the most raised in a year since 2021, the data show.

Anthropic IPO: investors expect $2 trillion in October

Half a dozen Anthropic backers told the Financial Times they expect an October float at $2 trillion or more. That would be the largest IPO in history. Measured against the revenue the company last disclosed, it is also a lower multiple than comparable AI stocks already fetch. The risks sit elsewhere, and they are specific. The number comes from investors, not the company. Six backers told the Financial Times that rising revenue would let the five-year-old lab more than double its valuation in an autumn listing. At $2 trillion it would eclipse SpaceX, which went public at $1.77 trillion in June. Anthropic itself has fixed nothing. Several investors said senior executives had not settled on a target, even privately. The models are the investors' own. The machinery is moving regardless. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are leading the offering, Quartz reported. Three bulge-bracket banks on a mandate is not a rumour. It is the difference between investors discussing a listing and a listing being built. The revenue, and the caveat attached to it Two figures matter. In May the company said its annualised revenue had passed $47bn, which is the last number Anthropic disclosed itself. Investors now expect that to reach $100bn to $120bn by the end of 2026, a rise of more than ten times across the year. Read the definition before the number. Annualised revenue is Anthropic's preferred measure. It infers full-year sales from recent performance rather than counting a year of receipts. That is a legitimate way for a fast-growing company to describe itself. It also means a strong month flatters the figure. It is not the number a public company reports. The multiple is less mad than it sounds Run the arithmetic on the disclosed figure. At $2 trillion against $47bn, Anthropic would trade at roughly 43 times revenue. Anthropic has no listed American peer to price against. But companies treated as AI beneficiaries have traded this year at about 55 times revenue, the FT notes, naming Palantir and the cloud group Nebius. On that comparison, $2 trillion is not an outlier. It is below where the market already values businesses with a fraction of Anthropic's growth rate. One of the investors went further. "If Anthropic is growing 800 percent a year, you'd think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times," the person said. "That would make them a $3 trillion company." The first risk is the American government Here is what the multiple does not price. Anthropic is in active litigation against the Department of Defense, which labelled it a supply-chain risk. In June the Commerce Department hit the company with export controls, and Anthropic briefly pulled Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its two leading models. That episode has a number attached. Two investors told the FT the temporary ban slowed revenue growth in June, before the company rebounded. So a regulator bent the growth curve once already this year, inside a single month. The episode also spooked customers who had built on those models. The second risk is that customers are looking at the bill Anthropic's market-leading model costs more than two and a half times as much to use as OpenAI's flagship, according to Artificial Analysis. Chinese open-weight models cost a fraction of either, and they improved sharply this year. The company gained market share among US businesses last month, on payments data from Ramp. The same analysts found those businesses were "hitting their limit on AI spend". Many are moving to cheaper alternatives. Some have gone further than switching models. Faced with rising costs, certain customers have reversed internal instructions telling employees to maximise their AI use. That is the uncomfortable pairing. Anthropic is winning share in a market whose buyers want to spend less, while Chinese models keep closing in on capability. Why the company is saying nothing Anthropic declined to comment, and it has a reason beyond preference. It filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. That puts it in a quiet period, limiting what it can say about its finances. So every number in circulation comes from investors who stand to gain from the listing. That is not a reason to dismiss them. It is a reason to attribute them carefully. The money behind those models is not small. Venture capitalists, sovereign wealth funds and other institutions have put just under $100bn into the company during 2026 alone. Its valuation passed OpenAI's for the first time in May, at $965bn post-money, and secondary trades have since marked it at $1.2 trillion. What the bulls actually say The case for is worth stating in its own words. Anthropic has spent the year releasing models that outperformed rivals, and selling them to businesses rather than consumers. One investor, who has also backed OpenAI and SpaceX, put it plainly to the FT. "It's easy to come up with challenges," the person said. The company "continues to be in first position in performance, positioning, and what people want exposure to". There is truth in that last clause. A listing this size is partly a bet on investor appetite for AI exposure, and appetite is not the same thing as fundamentals. Which is why the FT frames the risk as a market one. A float at $2 trillion would test public markets that are growing more nervous about the AI boom. What would settle it Two things, and the first is close. A public S-1 replaces every investor model with audited revenue. It will show whether the $47bn disclosed in May grew the way the projections assume. The second is the June dip. If one month of export controls measurably slowed growth, the filing will show it. That line matters more than the headline number. Until then the honest summary is narrow. The multiple is defensible on the numbers available. But the company cannot confirm them, its customers are trying to spend less, and its own government has already switched its best products off once.

FT: Investors eye $2trn Anthropic valuation in record IPO

Fervour for a lofty valuation comes as a result of Anthropic's rapidly growing revenue, sources told FT. Investors expect Anthropic to be valued at $2trn or more in its October initial public offering (IPO), doubling its initial aim of $1trn and dwarfing SpaceX as the largest public listing in history. The AI giant, which filed to go public in June, is yet to fix on a target. Several of the company's investors told The Financial Times (FT) that the fervour for a lofty valuation comes as a result of Anthropic's rapidly growing revenue which reportedly hit nearly $11bn in the second quarter this year. That number has more than doubled from the $4.8bn in the first quarter. The company's backers expect the five-year-old AI giant to reach an annualised revenue of between $100bn and $120bn this year. Anthropic's Claude AI products are a repeat headline-maker, competing for leadership in the space with its biggest rival OpenAI (which also hopes to go public), and the more recent crop of Chinese-made models taking the industry by storm with their cheaper alternatives. Confident backers, including venture capitalists, other industry giants and institutional investors have poured nearly $100bn into the company just this year, fuelling the business as it looks to build its own AI chips to keep up with the demand. Last month, AMD pledged $5bn into Anthropic in a deal that allows the AI giant access to 2GW of its latest-generation chips, while Amazon announced plans to pour $25bn into the company in April in exchange for Anthropic tapping more than $100bn to use the e-commerce juggernaut's cloud technologies. While Anthropic does not share how many use Claude, Statista placed it around 245m a month as of June this year. Comparatively, OpenAI's ChatGPT crossed 1bn users that same month. Despite this, Anthropic trumped OpenAI's valuation earlier this year, owing to its growing share of the more money-making enterprise sector, where it has been capturing a higher volume of first-time users. Earlier this year, the US government temporarily banned Anthropic from exporting two of its highly capable cybersecurity models over security concerns. While that ban was eventually lifted after a little more than two weeks, investors told FT that Anthropic's revenue suffered as a result in June. The company, however, rebounded at an "extraordinary rate" once the ban was lifted. The company is separately embroiled in an ongoing legal battle with the US government over the banning of its products for official use. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Anthropic: Anthropic revenue run rate tops $65 billion

The AI startup's ⁠latest ⁠revenue run rate - a metric that projects annual performance by extrapolating current sales levels - was up from the $47 billion in May and an extraordinary jump from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. Anthropic's annual revenue run rate topped $65 billion by the end of July, a person familiar with the matter said on Monday, underscoring the Claude creator's rapid growth ahead of a potential public listing later this year. The AI startup's ⁠latest ⁠revenue run rate - a metric that projects annual performance by extrapolating current sales levels - was up from the $47 billion in May and an extraordinary jump from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. The company had shared the latest figure with investors ⁠as part of ongoing financial updates, the person said. Bloomberg first reported the development earlier ⁠on Monday. Here are more details: Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, with its IPO valuation hinging on those forecasts, Reuters reported on Friday. The company has emerged as an AI frontrunner as its Claude coding agent gains traction among developers, helping the company draw steady enterprise dollars. Anthropic earlier this year confidentially filed for an IPO, as the startup ⁠and rival OpenAI race to make their market debuts amid strong investor appetite for AI firms. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in May after raising $65 billion in its Series H funding round, more than double its $380 billion valuation in February. (Reporting by Anzar Mehraj in Bengaluru and Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Leroy Leo)

Anthropic Hits $65 Billion Annualized Revenue Run Rate as Claude Drives Explosive Growth Ahead of Potenti

Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate reportedly surged to $65 billion by the end of July, underscoring booming enterprise demand for its Claude AI products as the company nears a potential blockbuster IPO. Anthropic Revenue Soars Seven Times in a Year The Claude maker shared the latest figure with investors over the weekend, CNBC reported on Monday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The $65 billion run rate represents roughly a sevenfold increase from a year earlier and is up sharply from the $47 billion run rate Anthropic reported in May. Anthropic also reported preliminary second-quarter revenue of $11.5 billion, marking a roughly 14-fold increase from the same period a year earlier, according to the report. Anthropic did not immediately respond to Benzinga's request for comment. Markets Anthropic to Make Its Public Debut? Prediction Market Odds Decline Anthropic's odds of going public soon have declined, as prediction markets reassess the timing of the AI startup's potential IPO. 1 min read Read this article Claude Enterprise Demand Fuels Growth Anthropic's rapid expansion has been driven largely by growing demand from businesses using Claude for coding, research, automation and other enterprise applications. The company's latest run rate also puts it ahead of rival OpenAI, whose annualized revenue reached about $40 billion. Anthropic Prepares For Potential IPO The revenue surge comes as Anthropic prepares for a possible public-market debut. The company confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, saying the filing gives it the option to go public depending on market conditions. Latest Private Market Opportunities Join 400,000+ Investors Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in its latest major funding round, raising the stakes for its IPO ambitions. However, the company still faces regulatory and government-related challenges, including its disputes over the use and export of its AI models. Last week, it was reported that Anthropic projects $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue by 2028. Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Tech Anthropic Left as the Only Private Company in the World? CEO Dario Amodei Pushes Back on Criticism From Critics: 'I Do Not Agree That...' Dario Amodei defended AI regulation while pushing back on Gavin Baker's criticism of Anthropic's approach to AI safety and competition. 5 min read Read this article Photo Courtesy: gguy on Shutterstock.com Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200 billion 2028 revenue forecast: Report

Wall Street is currently assessing Anthropic's valuation in light of its anticipated revenue growth for the upcoming IPO. The AI company forecasts remarkable revenue increases by 2028, which is pivotal for investor confidence. Revenue multiples derived from these forward-looking projections are being employed, with comparable companies such as Palantir and SpaceX serving as benchmarks. This strategy underscores the AI firm's rapid expansion and significant infrastructure investments. As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, Wall Street is looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now. Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to two people familiar with the company's financials, a figure that has not previously been reported. The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue "run rate," reflecting the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite. Bankers and investors are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts, four sources said. Using revenue multiples is common for high-growth software companies that have yet to establish a mature profit profile. But looking two years ahead ⁠is less ⁠typical, reflecting the speed at which Anthropic's business is expanding and the challenges of setting benchmarks for a company still spending heavily to build out its AI infrastructure, the people said. The pace of spending on AI investment has been responsible for pullbacks in many of the most popular tech stocks in recent months, including some of the firms viewed as comparable to Anthropic. There have been precedents among some of the fastest-growing companies that hit the market recently. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations in the runup to the firm's IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June, the people said. The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing an AI company whose margins are still being pressured by enormous spending on computing power, model training and hiring. Investors are betting that as Anthropic grows, revenue will rise faster than the costs required ⁠to support that growth, allowing margins to expand. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. SEARCHING FOR COMPSCloud infrastructure company Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir and Elon Musk's SpaceX are among the public companies being considered as reference points for Anthropic's valuation ahead of the company's analyst day, the people said. Public-market comparables are a crucial part ⁠of the IPO valuation process, giving investors a benchmark for how companies seen as having similar growth profiles and business models are valued. The peer group can also help determine which revenue or earnings multiples should be applied to a company's financial forecasts. Palantir is valued at 53 times this year's expected revenue, making it one of Wall Street's priciest stocks. SpaceX and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, LSEG data show. Each of the companies offers a different lens on Anthropic. Palantir has become a reference point for investors valuing businesses with rapid growth and exposure to AI. Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company, while SpaceX offers an example of a company valued in part on expectations for its future scale rather than its current financial profile. LOOKING PAST CURRENT EARNINGSEstablished companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings, or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the economics of the business. For Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale. Anthropic is spending enormous amounts on GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. Those expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but could become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows. The company's financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Anthropic's revenue run rate was ⁠about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company, before rising to more than $47 billion by May. Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million. The company has said its revenue run rate grew more than 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026. That growth is a key reason investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple. The valuation therefore rests on the expectation that Anthropic's current spending is funding a business that will eventually generate much higher revenue and margins. Training and inference could become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could become a smaller share of revenue as the company scales. "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time," said David Merkel, a principal at investment firm Aleph Investments. "Does it (AI) really produce so much additional productivity... These are just questions that we have to ask if we were thinking of pricing this, buying this."

Anthropic Touts 14-Fold Jump in Revenue for Would-Be Investors | PYMNTS.com

The artificial intelligence startup saw revenues for the second quarter increase more than 14-fold since the same period in 2025, Bloomberg News reported Friday (Aug. 14), citing documents viewed by the news outlet. Those documents showed Anthropic reporting a preliminary revenue figure of more than $11.5 billion for its most recently completed quarter, compared to $787 million during the same quarter last year. The company also reported positive adjusted operating income, the report added. As Bloomberg noted, this growth is happening as Anthropic is competing with rival OpenAI for enterprise customers. Anthropic had been seen as the underdog in this race, but has since enjoyed a wave of corporate adoption of its products for uses like coding. The report added that Anthropic's annualized revenue/run rate topped $47 billion in May. OpenAI has an annual run rate of more than $40 billion, though the two companies may not calculate those numbers the same way, Bloomberg said. In other Anthropic news, the Financial Times (FT) reported last week that investors expect the company to pursue a valuation of at least $2 trillion in an October initial public offering (IPO), a figure that would present the biggest stock-market debut ever. Six Anthropic backers told FT that the startup's rapid revenue growth could justify a valuation more than double its most recent level, which hit a $965 billion valuation in May after new investment. The report noted the risks still facing Anthropic, including competition from lower-cost Chinese models, increasing regulatory pressure and a continuing dispute with the U.S. government. A temporary Commerce Department ban on its leading models helped slow revenue growth in June, although investors said business later recovered. Also last week, PYMNTS wrote about efforts by major companies to make AI content traceable. This came after Anthropic began adding watermarks to its output to signify AI-generated content, following similar measures by Apple, Canon and Google. "The internet's response to AI slop has mostly worked backward. Platforms scan content after it is already uploaded, then try to guess whether a machine wrote it, an inherently probabilistic bet that it is losing ground as synthetic content gets cheaper to produce," that report said. "Anthropic, Apple, Canon and Google are each building a different layer underneath that guesswork: proof of where content came from, established the moment it is created, not detecting after the fact." For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO dream rests on staggering revenue bet

The artificial-intelligence boom is about to face one of its largest tests of valuations. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, is projecting roughly$190 billion to $200 billion in revenue for 2028, according to Reuters, citing people privy to the matter. That estimate is increasingly becoming a pillar of Wall Street's effort to value Anthropic ahead of what might be one of the largest initial public offerings on record. And the figures are staggering. Anthropic said in May it had a revenue run rate of more than $47 billion, Reuters reported. It would require more than quadrupling that annualized pace in around two years to reach $200 billion. One investor told Reuters that a valuation as high as $2 trillion was conceivable. "Could they get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could, and I just wonder if it would stay there over time," David Merkel, principal at Aleph Investments, told Reuters. That last element may be the question investors should be asking. Anthropic isn't simply asking Wall Street to value the business it has today. Its prospective IPO valuation depends on investors buying into the much bigger firm that management hopes it will become. Anthropic's revenue growth is the reason investors are looking so far ahead Anthropic's figures have been shifting so quickly that traditional valuation methodologies are less useful The corporation reported in February that its sales run rate hit $14 billion and that Claude Code alone had a run rate of nearly $2.5 billion. Business subscribers to Claude Code had quadrupled since the start of the year, with enterprise usage making up more than half of that product's income. Anthropic stated its revenue run rate had surpassed $30 billion by April, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2023. By May, the figure had crossed $47 billion. That's why lenders are looking at 2028 revenue and not just pricing the company on earnings now. Anthropic is still pouring money into GPUs, model training, inference, and talent, which is hurting present profitability. The bull case is that those costs will become a smaller fraction of revenue as the company grows. That growth is also visible outside of enterprise contracts. TechCrunch reported that Claude's paying-consumer revenue had risen about 75% since January 2026 among the users it analyzed, suggesting the company's traction is broadening beyond API and enterprise buyers. That diversification is important because it's easier to defend a $2 trillion valuation if Anthropic can develop multiple revenue engines, rather than depend on a limited set of cloud customers. The $2 trillion question is really a valuation-multiple question Anthropic does not have a clear public market twin. That is why bankers are reportedly looking at Palantir Technologies (PLTR), Cloudflare (NET) and SpaceX (SPCX) as reference points. Those comparisons are flawed, but they do help to explain how Wall Street could arrive at a figure as large as $2 trillion. Palantir trades at around 53 times its expected 2026 revenue, while Cloudflare and SpaceX each trade at roughly 41.6 times their expected 2026 revenue. It wouldn't need anything close to those multiples on its estimated 2028 revenue to justify a $2 trillion valuation for Anthropic. At $200 billion in revenue, a 10-times sales multiple would already equal $2 trillion. That's certainly an ambitious value, but it's a lot less severe than the multiples investors are already willing to pay for other high-growth AI businesses. MarketWatch notes there's an expectation that Anthropic might one day debut with a valuation of $2 trillion to $3 trillion, topping SpaceX's record-breaking public-market debut. The upside case thus relies on two assumptions: that revenues get close to Anthropic's estimates and that investors continue to offer a premium multiple to companies they view as essential to AI. Bloomberg / Getty Images Private markets are already testing that thesis Anthropic's valuation is already under heavy pressure ahead of an IPO. In February, a fundraising deal valued the corporation at $380 billion. Just a few months later, the May Series H fundraising valued it at $965 billion. That represents a rise of more than 150% in a few months. Then followed stories of secondary market trades that suggested valuations around $1.5 trillion; however, shares were difficult to get since few holders wanted to sell. Those data imply investor enthusiasm is not an abstraction. The private market is already nudging Anthropic toward the kind of valuation that public investors may soon be forced to accept. There's also an enterprise use case to fuel the hype. Anthropic's Claude Code has gradually become a key offering for developers. A recent Microsoft study using command-line AI coding agents indicated that adopters merged around 24% more pull requests than they otherwise would have. It suggests that coding agents could have measurable productivity effects, rather than being only experimental tools. That's not to say Anthropic will hit its sales targets. That does explain why organizations are ready to shell out big bucks for tools like Claude Code to some degree. Anthropic still has to prove the economics work The stakes are huge. Anthropic still faces the specter of massive infrastructure costs, brutal competition, and the risk that AI pricing will decline as models become cheaper to train and run. It's competing not only with Google, Meta, and increasingly powerful open weight models but also with OpenAI. The corporation is also asking investors to evaluate revenue that it has not yet earned. A $200 billion estimate for 2028 does not mean $200 billion of sales realized. That difference matters more and more as prices rise into the trillions. Numbers investors should know * $965 billion:Anthropic's May 2026 funding-round valuation. * $1.5 trillion: Reported secondary-market valuation in August. * $2 trillion+: Potential IPO valuation under discussion. * $47 billion+: Revenue run rate reached in May. * $190 billion-$200 billion: 2028 revenue projection. * $65 billion: Capital raised in Anthropic's May Series H. * $2.5 billion+: Claude Code run-rate revenue reported in February. * 75%: Growth in paid-consumer revenue since January in TechCrunch's analyzed data. In the end, Anthropic may justify a trillion-dollar valuation. The business is growing faster than most conventional public company frameworks are built to accommodate, and investors have already demonstrated a phenomenal readiness to pay for that expansion. But the valuation hinges on public investors believing today's spectacular growth can be maintained at a massive scale. Increasing run-rate revenue from $9 billion to $47 billion is a significant step. Going from $47 billion to roughly $200 billion is another. That is what makes Anthropic's IPO potentially historic. It will not simply test demand for another AI stock. It may test just how much of AI's future Wall Street is willing to buy today. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 17, 2026 at 9:03 AM.

Anthropic Plans Healthcare Push to Improve AI Image Before IPO | PYMNTS.com

That is one of the strategies Anthropic is sharing with potential investors in meetings ahead of its upcoming initial public offering (IPO), according to the report. Anthropic is also telling investors that it will fend off any threat from lower-priced offerings from Chinese AI developers by retaining its focus on building cutting-edge models. Most users want the best model that is currently available, the company said, per the report. The company is sharing these strategies with investors at a time when the company and other leading AI developers are facing tougher questions about potential challenges such as lower-cost models, growing public opposition to data center construction and, in the case of Anthropic, tension with the Trump administration, according to the report. Anthropic's upcoming initial public offering, and its performance after going public, will gauge investors' sentiment about all the top AI developers, per the report. Anthropic is aiming to launch its IPO in September or early October, according to the report. Anthropic did not immediately reply to PYMNTS' request for comment. Anthropic announced June 1 that it confidentially filed for an IPO by submitting a draft registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). "This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review," the company said in its announcement. "The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors." About a week earlier, on May 28, Anthropic became the most valuable AI startup in the world when it was valued at $965 billion post-money in a Series H funding round in which it raised $65 billion. That valuation was up from the $380 billion valuation Anthropic achieved three months earlier in a February Series G funding round in which it raised $30 billion. Anthropic President and Co-Founder Daniela Amodei said June 4 that the cost of training AI models is driving companies like Anthropic to go public. It was reported in July that Anthropic planned to meet with potential investors ahead of an IPO that could take place as soon as October.

Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200 billion 2028 revenue forecast, sources say

As Anthropic prepares for its initial public offering, Wall Street is keenly evaluating the company's worth through the lens of its projected revenue growth, expected to soar by 2028. This outlook is crucial, leading investors to utilize enterprise value-to-revenue multiples derived from forecasted figures. Benchmarking against industry players like Palantir and SpaceX highlights both the promising future and the infrastructural challenges facing Anthropic. As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, Wall Street is looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now. Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to two people familiar with the company's financials, a figure that has not previously been reported. The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue "run rate," reflecting the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite. US MarketsPowered By As on 15 Aug 2026, 01:30 AM IST S&P 500 Top Gainers Copart31.61(7.55%) Advanced Micro Devices514.39(6.50%) Fox61.41(5.70%) Seagate Technology Hldgs973.44(5.65%) Gainers" S&P 500 Top Losers Coterra Energy32.56(-8.62%) Broadcom392.99(-5.94%) GoDaddy94.91(-5.56%) Applied Materials507.18(-5.12%) Losers" Bankers and investors are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts, four sources said. Using revenue multiples is common for high-growth software companies that have yet to establish a mature profit profile. But looking two years ahead ⁠is less ⁠typical, reflecting the speed at which Anthropic's business is expanding and the challenges of setting benchmarks for a company still spending heavily to build out its AI infrastructure, the people said. The pace of spending on AI investment has been responsible for pullbacks in many of the most popular tech stocks in recent months, including some of the firms viewed as comparable to Anthropic. There have been precedents among some of the fastest-growing companies that hit the market recently. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations in the runup to the firm's IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June, the people said. The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing an AI company whose margins are still being pressured by enormous spending on computing power, model training and hiring. Investors are betting that as Anthropic grows, revenue will rise faster than the costs required ⁠to support that growth, allowing margins to expand. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. SEARCHING FOR COMPSCloud infrastructure company Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir and Elon Musk's SpaceX are among the public companies being considered as reference points for Anthropic's valuation ahead of the company's analyst day, the people said. Public-market comparables are a crucial part ⁠of the IPO valuation process, giving investors a benchmark for how companies seen as having similar growth profiles and business models are valued. The peer group can also help determine which revenue or earnings multiples should be applied to a company's financial forecasts. Palantir is valued at 53 times this year's expected revenue, making it one of Wall Street's priciest stocks. SpaceX and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, LSEG data show. Each of the companies offers a different lens on Anthropic. Palantir has become a reference point for investors valuing businesses with rapid growth and exposure to AI. Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company, while SpaceX offers an example of a company valued in part on expectations for its future scale rather than its current financial profile. LOOKING PAST CURRENT EARNINGSEstablished companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings, or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the economics of the business. For Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale. Anthropic is spending enormous amounts on GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. Those expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but could become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows. The company's financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Anthropic's revenue run rate was ⁠about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company, before rising to more than $47 billion by May. Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million. The company has said its revenue run rate grew more than 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026. That growth is a key reason investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple. The valuation therefore rests on the expectation that Anthropic's current spending is funding a business that will eventually generate much higher revenue and margins. Training and inference could become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could become a smaller share of revenue as the company scales. "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time," said David Merkel, a principal at investment firm Aleph Investments. "Does it (AI) really produce so much additional productivity... These are just questions that we have to ask if we were thinking of pricing this, buying this."

Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190B-$200B 2028 revenue forecast: sources

As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, Wall Street is looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now. Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to two people familiar with the company's financials, a figure that has not previously been reported. The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue "run rate," reflecting the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite. Bankers and investors are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts, four sources said. Using revenue multiples is common for high-growth software companies that have yet to establish a mature profit profile. But looking two years ahead is less typical, reflecting the speed at which Anthropic's business is expanding and the challenges of setting benchmarks for a company still spending heavily to build out its AI infrastructure, the people said. The pace of spending on AI investment has been responsible for pullbacks in many of the most popular tech stocks in recent months, including some of the firms viewed as comparable to Anthropic. There have been precedents among some of the fastest-growing companies that hit the market recently. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations in the runup to the firm's IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June, the people said. The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing an AI company whose margins are still being pressured by enormous spending on computing power, model training and hiring. Investors are betting that as Anthropic grows, revenue will rise faster than the costs required to support that growth, allowing margins to expand. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir and Elon Musk's SpaceX are among the public companies being considered as reference points for Anthropic's valuation ahead of the company's analyst day, the people said. Public-market comparables are a crucial part of the IPO valuation process, giving investors a benchmark for how companies seen as having similar growth profiles and business models are valued. The peer group can also help determine which revenue or earnings multiples should be applied to a company's financial forecasts. Palantir is valued at 53 times this year's expected revenue, making it one of Wall Street's priciest stocks. SpaceX and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, LSEG data show. Each of the companies offers a different lens on Anthropic. Palantir has become a reference point for investors valuing businesses with rapid growth and exposure to AI. Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company, while SpaceX offers an example of a company valued in part on expectations for its future scale rather than its current financial profile. Established companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings, or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the economics of the business. For Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale. Anthropic is spending enormous amounts on GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. Those expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but could become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows. The company's financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Anthropic's revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company, before rising to more than $47 billion by May. Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million. The company has said its revenue run rate grew more than 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026. That growth is a key reason investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple. The valuation therefore rests on the expectation that Anthropic's current spending is funding a business that will eventually generate much higher revenue and margins. Training and inference could become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could become a smaller share of revenue as the company scales. "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time," said David Merkel, a principal at investment firm Aleph Investments. "Does it (AI) really produce so much additional productivity... These are just questions that we have to ask if we were thinking of pricing this, buying this."

Anthropic's IPO: A $200 Billion Revenue Bet

Anthropic is projecting annual revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion by 2028, according to a report citing people familiar with the company's finances. The AI developer, known for its Claude models, is preparing for what could become one of the largest IPOs on record. Bankers and investors are looking further ahead than usual to price the company, using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts stretching two years into the future. This approach helps investors judge how much of Anthropic's current $965 billion private valuation is justified by future growth rather than present earnings.

Anthropic revenue run rate passed $65 billion in July - report By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Anthropic PBC reached an annualized revenue run rate of more than $65 billion by the end of July, according to a Bloomberg report Monday. The figure represents more than a sevenfold increase from the company's pace at the end of 2025. The report, citing people familiar with the matter, said Anthropic shared the figures as part of a regular update with investors. The company's revenue run rate topped $9 billion in late 2025 and crossed $47 billion in May. Get instant alerts on market-moving headlines on InvestingPro -- now 55% off. The growth supports Anthropic's plans for a public listing. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed confidential paperwork to go public, with Anthropic expected to debut on Wall Street as soon as this fall, ahead of OpenAI. Anthropic reported preliminary revenue of more than $11.5 billion in its latest completed quarter, compared with $787 million in the corresponding period in 2025, Bloomberg News had reported earlier. The company also reported positive adjusted operating income for the quarter. Anthropic has gained traction with AI tools that streamline complex tasks, including coding. OpenAI's revenue run rate recently exceeded $40 billion, Bloomberg News has reported, though the two companies may not measure the metric the same way.

Anthropic to beat SpaceX? Investors bet on $2 trillion valuation in record IPO

Anthropic is heading towards a potential record-breaking IPO, with investors reportedly expecting a valuation of more than $2 trillion as the AI startup's revenue continues to surge. The Claude maker's rapid growth, strong demand for AI tools and lofty revenue projections are fuelling bullish expectations despite intensifying competition, regulatory pressure and other challenges. After SpaceX's historic market debut, investors are now eyeing the upcoming mega initial public offering of AI startup Anthropic, which is expected to smash the record for the world's largest-ever IPO with a valuation of $2 trillion or more. Anthropic, which is behind popular AI assistant Claude, confidentially filed for a US initial public offering last month. It did not disclose the size or the terms of the offering. This comes after it raised $65 billion at a post-money valuation of $965 billion in late May, putting it ahead of rival OpenAI. US MarketsPowered By As on 13 Aug 2026, 01:30 AM IST S&P 500 Top Gainers Super Micro Computer37.61(19.02%) Dell Technologies484.50(9.87%) Hewlett Packard58.79(8.11%) Seagate Technology Hldgs878.21(7.03%) Gainers" S&P 500 Top Losers Coterra Energy32.56(-8.62%) Texas Pacific Land342.77(-6.08%) Cencora314.17(-5.90%) First Solar226.77(-5.87%) Losers" While investors await the details of the IPO, around six of the company's backers told the Financial Times that Anthropic's rapidly rising revenue would enable it to more than double its current valuation in a planned autumn float. The report quoted the unnamed backers as saying that booming demand for the lab's advanced AI models and tools justifies their lofty expectations. Investors forecast Anthropic's annualised revenue to be between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026. If Anthropic is growing at 800% a year, even at the incredibly low end, the shares of the company would trade at 30 times its revenue, and that would make the AI startup a $3 trillion company, the report quoted a source as saying. Also read | The $965 billion AI company behind ChatGPT's biggest rival is finally going public, and it could be the biggest Wall Street debut ever Anthropic, however, does not have a publicly listed US peer that would help investors have a benchmark to assess its valuation. But companies which are seen as AI beneficiaries, such as data intelligence group Palantir and cloud company Nebius, have traded this year at around 55 times revenue, FT reported. These bullish expectations come despite rising challenges, including rising competition from Chinese rivals, growing stress on AI regulation and a simmering feud with the Donald Trump-led US government. Those concerns, especially the US Commerce Department's temporary ban on Anthropic's best models, contributed to overall revenue growth slowing in June, FT cited two investors with knowledge of the matter as saying. However, they added that the company had rebounded and continued to grow at an extraordinary rate even by Silicon Valley standards. Anthropic IPO and AI boomThe Anthropic IPO filing reflects growing confidence among investors seeking exposure to the artificial intelligence boom. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has emerged as one of the strongest challengers in the AI industry. The company gained recognition through its Claude family of AI chatbots, which compete directly with ChatGPT and other advanced AI systems. After SpaceX's IPO raised $75 billion, making it the biggest-ever IPO by proceeds, the company began trading at $150 per share in June, marking an 11% premium to its IPO price of $135. Its market capitalisation topped $2 trillion on its debut day. After listing, the shares of the company surged more than 50% over three sessions. The shares of the Elon Musk-led company have jumped 36% over the past five sessions, but remain 3% below their listing price. Also read | South Korea's Kospi swings from bear to bull market in just a month. Is AI trade regaining strength? (With inputs from agencies) (Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times.)

Anthropic goes on charm offensive with investors ahead of massive IPO that could rival SpaceX: report

Anthropic has been meeting with potential investors ahead of what could be a record-breaking IPO to assuage their concerns around the many challenges facing the AI industry, according to a report. The Silicon Valley giant - worth a whopping $965 billion - is targeting a stock market debut this fall that could end up surpassing Elon Musk's mammoth SpaceX IPO, though the AI industry is facing several hurdles that have left investors wary. In recent weeks, potential investors have grilled Anthropic on how it expects a handful of challenges to hit growth. Those range from cheaper Chinese rivals and regulatory hurdles to heated backlash against data centers and concerns about massive spending, according to the Wall Street Journal. During these pre-IPO meetings, Anthropic executives have played down the threat of Chinese competition, arguing that they are focused on delivering the latest cutting-edge technology that can beat out rivals, the Journal reported. Anthropic also told some investors that it plans to push into AI's healthcare and biology uses, which could tamp down the growing negative public sentiment around the new tech, sources told the Journal. There has been huge uncertainty around whether tech companies' multibillion-dollar commitments to AI spending will eventually pay off, or whether it's a repeat of the late 1990s "dot-com bubble" - resulting in choppy trading for AI-exposed stocks. Anthropic has been seen as the front-runner in the global AI race largely thanks to its successful coding tool, Claude Code, and its ultra-powerful bot, Claude Mythos. But reports of Mythos running rampant during internal testing and trying to hack into services using fake identities has fueled safety concerns around the potential risks surrounding top AI models. All eyes are on Anthropic's public debut - which is expected in September or early October - since the price it selects will set the tone for how investors value other major AI companies, according to the Journal. Rival OpenAI is expected to make its own stock market debut as late as next year. The AI public offerings come in the wake of SpaceX's recording-breaking IPO in June. The tech giant surpassed $2 trillion in trading, briefly making Musk the world's first trillionaire. Since then, the stock has slumped more than 16% to $134.60 a share, just below its IPO price of $135 - a potential warning sign of the rocky trading that other massive IPOs, which are mostly trading on public sentiment and potential payoffs, could see. In the meantime, Anthropic has been signing huge, multibillion-dollar computing partnerships with AI startups and large companies like SpaceX and Google, as firms compete for a limited supply of the computing power needed to power data centers. In May, Anthropic reported that its run-rate revenue - a prediction of annual revenue - had surpassed $47 billion on resilient demand for its Claude Code tool. It has continued to see robust demand for its AI and coding tools. CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly insisted that most users want the latest and greatest AI models, meaning Anthropic should stay in the lead as long as it can continue to churn out bots that beat China's alternatives. Anthropic did not immediately respond to The Post's request for comment.

Anthropic's $2 Trillion Bet Is Wall Street's Riskiest Gamble of the Year

Anthropic (NASDAQ:ANTP) wants to go public in October at a valuation of $2tn or more. Some of its own backers are modelling $3tn. Either number would make it the largest stock market debut in history, and I think it is the riskiest trade on offer anywhere in the market this year. I am not saying Anthropic is not a genuinely exceptional business, because it plainly is. What I am saying is that exceptional and correctly priced are two different questions, and right now the gap between them is wide enough to worry about. Here is the part investors keep skipping past. The valuation being pitched assumes annualised revenue will nearly triple by the end of 2026, and it is a bold assumption to hang the largest IPO in history on, especially with a listing date that arrives at exactly the wrong moment to test it. The number itself is not audited revenue. It is an annualised run-rate, a projection stretched forward from a few strong months rather than a certified year of sales. We already know how fast that projection can move. In June, a temporary Commerce Department restriction on Anthropic's top models slowed growth almost overnight. A single policy decision did that. I would want to know what the next one could do before I paid a $2tn price for the answer. A valuation this size does not price in one good quarter. It prices in years of near-uninterrupted acceleration, with no room for a repeat of June and no room for the regulatory and geopolitical friction that is still clearly in play around this company. Look at what is happening around Anthropic this very week. CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV), one of the AI infrastructure names most tightly bound to Nvidia, has admitted it would struggle badly if forced to shift away from Nvidia's chips. Far from a footnote, it is a signal of how tightly wound and circular the financing behind this entire boom has become, right as Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) walks into earnings shadowed by China licensing uncertainty and mounting questions over who is really funding whom across the AI supply chain. Then look at the public comparisons investors are actually using to justify Anthropic's number. Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR) and Nebius (NASDAQ:NBIS) are trading at somewhere between forty and fifty-five times revenue, and both are already drawing serious short-seller fire even as their share prices climb. If the market is this uneasy about paying up for AI names that already report audited, public numbers, it should give serious pause to anyone pricing a private AI lab off a forward-looking metric instead. I think about SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) as the clearest lesson in what happens when private valuations move faster than reality can confirm them. It went from roughly three hundred and fifty billion dollars to eight hundred billion in about a year, and there is already talk of it approaching two trillion before it has even listed. Momentum in a private market is not the same thing as durability in a public one, and Anthropic is walking the same path, only faster, straight into an IPO window where investors are already nervous. Pricing the largest IPO in history off unaudited, extrapolated numbers, in a market already flinching at AI multiples, is the central risk in this whole story, not a footnote to it. My advice to clients weighing exposure to this listing, directly or through the AI trade more broadly, is to separate genuine long-term conviction from October momentum. Those are not the same trade, and treating them as one is how sharp corrections get made. This is exactly the kind of moment where independent, professional guidance earns its keep, because the difference between participating intelligently and getting caught out comes down to timing and discipline, not enthusiasm. Anthropic may well prove every one of its bulls right eventually. But betting $2tn on it happening on schedule, in this market, this October, is not conviction. It is speculation dressed up as certainty.

Anthropic files for IPO: revenue run rate tops $65 billion

AIAnthropic files for IPO: revenue run rate tops $65 billion Claude maker could go public by fall 2026 near $1 trillion Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, has quietly filed confidential paperwork for an IPO. Several reports say it could reach the stock market as soon as fall 2026. The move comes after Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate reportedly topped $65 billion by the end of July 2026. That reported run rate, above $65 billion, would be more than seven times higher than the roughly $9 billion it was said to be generating at the end of 2025. If that pace holds, Anthropic is setting up what could become one of the most closely watched tech listings in years, and it may get to the public markets before its biggest rival does. Valuation talk starts around $1 trillion, based on investor discussions cited in the reporting. Some investors are throwing out numbers of $2 trillion or more if Anthropic reaches the $100 billion to $120 billion annualized revenue that some models project for the end of 2026, then grows to $190 billion to $200 billion by 2028. That said, public-market sentiment can still swing sharply before listing day arrives. The jump appears to be coming from enterprise demand for Claude, especially in coding, workflow automation, and other reasoning-heavy tasks. Those kinds of deals tend to be larger, stick around longer, and can help support margins. Preliminary Q2 2026 revenue reportedly came in above $11.5 billion, versus $787 million a year earlier. Reports also point to a first adjusted operating profit, a run rate that by one measure sits above a rival's $40 billion-plus, and a possible $7 billion Decart deal still being weighed. If you follow AI stocks, this is one to keep an eye on. You still can't buy Anthropic, and the company remains private for now ahead of a possible fall 2026 listing.

Anthropic's revenue could reach $200bn in 2028

Bankers and investors are valuing Anthropic using multiples of projected revenue two years out, an unusual method that reflects the speed of its growth. Its annualized revenue reached $47bn in May, up from around $9bn at the end of 2025, according to figures provided by the company. Annualized revenue is a theoretical 12-month construct based solely on May's revenue. To set a valuation, investors are notably looking at Palantir, Cloudflare and SpaceX, three companies that offer different points of comparison. Palantir trades at 53x its expected revenue this year, while SpaceX and Cloudflare come in at about 41.6x their revenue projected for 2026. Anthropic continues to spend considerable sums on GPUs, model training, inference and hiring. Investors are betting these costs will weigh less as a share of the business as revenue grows and margins improve. That trajectory is fueling extremely lofty valuation scenarios, as high as $2,000bn under some assumptions cited by investors. The question that has been hanging over the market for months is whether AI growth and the expected productivity gains can sustainably justify such valuation levels. Despite a few jolts, the market is answering yes. Revenue already off the charts Today, fewer than 30 listed companies generate more than $200bn in revenue a year (2025 data). The top three are from the United States: Amazon ($717bn), ahead of Walmart ($706bn) and UnitedHealth ($448bn). However, as early as the end of this year, companies exposed to AI should dominate the Top 10. Samsung Electronics is expected to push UnitedHealth off the third step of the podium by year-end, closely followed by Alphabet. For comparison, TotalEnergies, the French company with the highest revenue, delivered $181bn in 2025.

Anthropic meets investors to shore up confidence ahead of planned September IPO- WSJ By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Anthropic is holding meetings with potential investors to build confidence ahead of what could become the largest initial public offering in history, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Anthropic is planning a public debut in September or early October, the WSJ report said. Its main competitor, OpenAI, is now expected to complete an IPO that could occur as late as next year. Investors have questioned Anthropic executives about these issues in pre-IPO meetings in recent weeks, asking how they might affect the company's growth, the WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the discussions. The conversations show the uncertainty around which companies will lead in AI and the financial strength of businesses in this sector. The $965 billion artificial intelligence company faces several challenges that have prompted investors to examine its business more closely. These include the recent rise of lower-cost AI systems from China, tensions with the Trump administration, and growing opposition to data center construction across the United States. Company executives have minimized concerns about Chinese competition in meetings, telling investors that Anthropic focuses on providing advanced AI models, the WSJ report said. Chief Executive Dario Amodei and other top U.S. AI leaders have stated publicly that most users prefer the most intelligent AI systems available, suggesting that Chinese systems pose less of a threat since their capabilities typically lag behind top AI models by at least several months. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

Anthropic heads to Wall Street, valuation up to $3,000bn

(Alliance News) - Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company founded in 2021 by siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, is preparing for a possible stock market debut in October, in what could become one of the biggest IPOs in Wall Street history, La Repubblica wrote on Friday. The valuation remains uncertain, as the company and its advisers have not set a price range. According to the estimates cited, Anthropic, valued at $965bn in the latest funding round in May, could reach a market capitalization of between $2,000bn and $3,000bn, based on the most aggressive valuations. As the newspaper explains, the outlook reflects strong business growth: after $47bn in revenue in the 12 months to May, analysts estimate turnover of between $100bn and $120bn in 2026. The company is also said to be considering new acquisitions. Among possible targets, according to Bloomberg, is startup Decart AI, valued at around $6bn. Anthropic could therefore come to market with a valuation above that assigned in the latest funding round to OpenAI, cited at $730bn. By Claudia Cavaliere, Alliance News reporter