Anthropic to File S-1 After Labor Day, Eyes $2 Trillion Valuation

Anthropic plans to publish its IPO prospectus after the Sept. 7 Labor Day holiday, advancing a deal bankers have floated as a record $100 billion raise near a $2 trillion valuation.

"SpaceX's AI math already pushed past the plausible," Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, said of the market claims underpinning the largest AI listings.

The Claude maker is weighing a longer lock-up period after the IPO and allowing existing shareholders to sell stock in the offering, according to The Information. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion at the end of July, up from roughly $9 billion in late 2025, a sevenfold jump in seven months. Preliminary second-quarter revenue topped $11.5 billion, a 14-fold rise from a year earlier, and the quarter produced positive adjusted operating income, reportedly a first among frontier AI labs.

The offering would top SpaceX's $85.7 billion raise in June, which broke Saudi Aramco's $25.6 billion record from 2019. Anthropic told IPO investors it is chasing a market above $30 trillion, topping SpaceX's $28.5 trillion claim, while its private-market valuation of $965 billion from May would need to roughly double within months.

A $30 Trillion Pitch Against $2.4 Trillion in Sector Revenue

Anthropic's own forecast of up to $200 billion in revenue by 2028 would capture under 1 percent of the claimed market. The 191 technology companies in the S&P 1500 earned about $2.4 trillion last year, meaning the pitched market is 12 times what the entire listed U.S. tech sector brings in. A total addressable market counts the value of work AI models could one day perform, pricing the automation of much of human labor.

The company confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the SEC on June 1, saying the number of shares and price had not yet been set. A public filing after Labor Day would put Anthropic on a path to price by the fourth quarter, with the deal's size and valuation set to test whether the private-market price can hold. Prediction markets already treat the listing as the most likely big IPO of 2026, with Anthropic overtaking SpaceX at the top of the betting board.

Lock-Up Terms Set the Post-IPO Clock

A longer lock-up would keep more shares off the market in the months after listing, supporting the price while Anthropic spends heavily on compute. Allowing shareholders to sell in the IPO gives early investors and employees an exit at the offering price, balancing the two competing pressures. The numbers are unaudited and could be revised before the filing lands, and adjusted profit typically strips out costs such as stock pay. Heavy compute bills could push later quarters back into losses.

The deal arrives as the AI sector's public-market pipeline fills. OpenAI's finance chief told staff in August the company would go public in 2027, while Nvidia's investments in AI companies have drawn scrutiny over circular financing. Investors would fund years of infrastructure spending long before sustained profits arrive, hoping the raise can top SpaceX's record haul. The prospectus, expected after Labor Day, will test whether institutional demand matches the $2 trillion valuation bankers have floated.

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