Anthropic: Investors Expect IPO Valuation of $2 Trillion, More Than SpaceX

Anthropic’s planned October IPO may come with a price tag that sounds like a typo: $2 trillion or more. The Financial Times says that figure is being floated by half a dozen investors, not by the company itself. If it lands there, Anthropic would leap past SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion listing from June and set a new record for a public debut.

The catch is that the number is still very much in the air. Investors told the FT that Anthropic’s executives have not given them a valuation target, even privately. With the company in a quiet period after filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in June, it’s also saying very little in public.

The bullish case rests on growth that would make most software companies look asleep. One investor told the FT that with annual growth of about 800 percent, even a 30-times-revenue multiple could justify a $3 trillion valuation. Anthropic is already being compared with companies such as Palantir and Nebius, both of which have traded this year at roughly 55 times revenue.

The revenue numbers have moved fast. Anthropic’s annualised run rate was around $9 billion at the end of 2025, then passed $30 billion in spring 2026 and $47 billion in May. On a quarterly basis, the FT says revenue rose from $4.8 billion in the first quarter to almost $11 billion in the second. Backers now expect an annualised rate of $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of 2026, while venture funds, sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors have poured just under $100 billion into the company in 2026 alone.

Anthropic also crossed OpenAI in two ways this year. It moved ahead on revenue in spring 2026, helped by a business-heavy model built around enterprise customers and API usage, while OpenAI’s growth leans much more on ChatGPT. It also overtook OpenAI on valuation in May 2026, reaching $965 billion including the money raised at the time. But OpenAI still dominates on users, with ChatGPT above 1 billion monthly users and Anthropic’s Claude estimated at around 245 million monthly users in June 2026.

The risks are real, and they are not subtle. Anthropic is still in litigation with the US Department of Defense, which called it a supply-chain risk this year. In June, the US Commerce Department forced the company to briefly pull its top models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, under export controls. The restrictions were lifted after a little over two weeks, but the episode shook customers and June revenue growth came in weaker before rebounding. Add in pricier models, tighter AI budgets at businesses and faster-moving Chinese rivals, and the IPO math starts to look less like certainty and more like a very expensive bet.