Anthropic backers bet on $2 trillion IPO to top SpaceX record

Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, surpassing SpaceX's record $1.77 trillion IPO to become the largest ever. Six of the company's backers told the Financial Times that rapidly rising revenue justifies more than doubling the startup's current $965 billion private valuation.

"If Anthropic can sustain 800 percent annual growth, even a conservative 30 times revenue multiple would value the company close to $3 trillion," one investor told the FT. The same backer noted that Palantir and Nebius, both treated as AI beneficiaries, trade at roughly 55 times revenue.

Anthropic's annualized revenue reached $47 billion in May, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. Investors project that figure to land between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026. The company raised $65 billion in a Series H round in May at a $965 billion post-money valuation, briefly overtaking OpenAI's last reported primary valuation. It filed confidential IPO paperwork with the SEC on June 1, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley leading the offering.

The listing would hand billions of dollars in gains to early investors in the five-year-old company, but it would also test whether public markets accept private-market logic for frontier AI. SpaceX proved public markets will pay up for a category-defining company at unprecedented scale — and then marked the stock back down once the hype met a real earnings report.

The Revenue Math Behind the $2 Trillion Bet

Anthropic's backers point to booming demand for its Claude models as the reason their expectations aren't out of line. The company said in May that more than 300,000 businesses use Claude, with more than 1,000 customers spending over $1 million a year. Claude Code, the company's coding assistant, has been a major growth driver within the enterprise segment.

The startup has pulled ahead of rivals OpenAI and Google this year on the strength of models that outperform the competition, and it has leaned hard into selling to business customers. Venture firms, sovereign wealth funds, and other big investors poured close to $100 billion into the company over the course of 2026, and its valuation overtook OpenAI's for the first time in May.

There's no U.S. public company that maps directly onto Anthropic, so investors are borrowing comparisons where they can. Anthropic executives haven't settled on a valuation target for the IPO yet, even in private, according to several investors, so backers are building their own models instead.

The SpaceX Precedent Cuts Both Ways

In June, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company priced its IPO at $135 a share, valuing it at $1.77 trillion and raising $75 billion — the largest public offering ever recorded and more than double Saudi Aramco's previous record from 2019. Shares climbed further once trading opened, briefly pushing SpaceX's value above $2 trillion, before drifting back down toward its IPO price in the weeks since as investors reassessed how much of that valuation was really about Musk versus the business underneath it.

That's the pattern Anthropic is now being measured against, and it doubles as the warning built into every bullish investor model out there. SpaceX proved public markets would pay up for a category-defining company at a scale nobody thought possible. It also proved those same markets will mark a stock right back down once the hype meets a real earnings report.

The company still faces plenty of uncertainty. It's in active litigation against the Department of Defense, which labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk earlier this year, and it briefly had to pull models like Fable 5 after export controls hit in June. That episode rattled some customers. Cost is becoming a bigger issue too. Cloud cost analytics firm Vantage found that on standard published rates, OpenAI's comparable models typically undercut Claude on input pricing, with workhorse tier models running around $1.75 per million tokens on OpenAI's side against $3 on Anthropic's, though the gap narrows once caching and long context work are factored in.

Chinese open-weight alternatives have also gotten dramatically better this year at a fraction of the price. Anthropic still grew its share of U.S. business customers last month, per data from payments company Ramp, but Ramp's own analysts found businesses are increasingly hitting the ceiling on what they're willing to spend on AI and shifting to cheaper tools.

OpenAI filed its own confidential paperwork with the SEC a week after Anthropic and had been eyeing a public debut as soon as this fall at a valuation above $1 trillion. More recently, Sam Altman's team has reportedly leaned toward pushing the listing into 2027 rather than accept anything below that trillion-dollar mark, a decision tied partly to a bridge loan SoftBank is on the hook to repay. Behind those two, the pipeline is getting crowded. Data platform Databricks, last valued around $134 billion, has been IPO ready for years but has repeatedly found reasons to wait, and its CEO called 2026 "a terrible year to go public" simply because of how much attention SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are soaking up. Payments giant Stripe, valued in the $106 billion to $159 billion range on secondary markets, remains the market's longest running will-they-won't-they, with no filing yet in sight.

Anthropic is racing to be the second of the group across the finish line, betting that investors will treat a $2 trillion price tag the same way they treated SpaceX's — as a bet worth making rather than a bubble waiting to pop. If the listing holds that level, it tells the market that frontier AI still has room for extraordinary multiples. If it breaks, the damage will not stay with Anthropic. It will move through data centers, chip demand forecasts, and the secondary funds that marked these shares up on paper.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.