- Investors reportedly model a $2 trillion or higher valuation for Anthropic’s October IPO.
- The figure would top SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion IPO valuation from June.
- Anthropic’s own executives have not set a target; the number comes from investor modelling.
Anthropic is reportedly being valued by its own backers at $2 trillion or more ahead of an expected October initial public offering, according to the Financial Times, which cited half a dozen investors in the company.
That would put the Claude maker above SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion valuation when it went public on the Nasdaq in June, potentially making Anthropic’s debut the largest IPO in history within months of SpaceX setting the record.
Where that $2 trillion number actually comes from matters. Anthropic’s senior executives have not set an IPO valuation target, even in private conversations with investors, according to the FT’s sourcing.
The figure is investors’ own modelling, built off the company’s revenue trajectory rather than anything Anthropic itself has said. Anthropic confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC in June, four days after closing its Series, which puts it in a quiet period that limits what it can say publicly about its business.
A valuation that has nearly tripled in three months
Anthropic’s private-market climb has been unusually steep even by AI-industry standards. It was valued at $380 billion in February, before closing a $65 billion Series H in May that lifted its post-money valuation to $965 billion, a round led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, which briefly overtook OpenAI, then valued around $852 billion, for the first time.
The round itself followed a pattern Tech Funding News had tracked for months: a $30B raise at a $900B valuation reported in May, arriving barely three months after the $380 billion Series G closed in February. Since then, the repricing has continued in markets where Anthropic has no direct control over the number.
TFN reported in July that shares of Anthropic were changing hands on secondary markets at an implied $1.2 trillion valuation, a 550% jump from a year earlier, though secondary pricing reflects illiquid, minority stakes rather than a formal valuation.
Anthropic’s annualised revenue crossed $47 billion in May, up from $14 billion in February. Investors now expect that figure to reach $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of 2026, a run rate that would represent more than tenfold growth in under a year. That growth is being driven largely by enterprise adoption of Claude and Claude Code, prompting investors to model Anthropic against public AI-adjacent comparables such as Palantir and Nebius, even though the company has no direct listed peer.
The SpaceX benchmark
The comparison to SpaceX is not incidental. SpaceX priced its own IPO at $135 a share on June 12, 2026, valuing the company at $1.77 trillion, the largest IPO in history at the time, before an over-allotment option pushed total proceeds to $85.7 billion and its share price climbed further in trading. A $2 trillion Anthropic listing would clear that mark by roughly $230 billion.
As businesses, the two have almost nothing in common. SpaceX’s valuation rests on two decades of physical infrastructure and now includes a stake in xAI, folded into the same public entity. Anthropic is trying to justify a similar price on software revenue that, however fast it’s growing, is still a fraction of the cash flow a company like SpaceX or Amazon can point to.
That gap shows up in the infrastructure spending required to sustain Anthropic’s growth. Amazon has committed billions to the company, including $5 billion folded into the May round, while AMD has pledged a further $5 billion tied to chip access. Google has also continued to expand its own multibillion-dollar investment and compute partnership with the company. None of that capital shows up as revenue, but all of it underwrites the growth rate investors are now using to justify a $2 trillion price tag.
The risks sitting underneath the number
There are real reasons this could fall short. Anthropic’s flagship model costs more than 2.5 times as much to run as OpenAI’s comparable offering, according to Artificial Analysis data cited by the FT. Chinese open-weight models are priced at a fraction of that, and some enterprise customers are already trimming AI budgets rather than expanding them.
The company has also had a rockier run with US policy than the revenue numbers alone suggest. The Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk in early 2026, and President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Claude, before a federal judge granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction blocking the ban. Separately, US export controls in June forced Anthropic to briefly suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models before the restrictions were lifted at the end of the month.
Nobody actually knows if $2 trillion will be held by October, including, apparently, Anthropic. What’s harder to argue with is the trajectory: a company worth $380 billion in February is being modelled at five times that before it has even listed, on the strength of an investor pitch that public markets have almost never been asked to take at face value.
