Six Anthropic backers told the Financial Times that they expect the Claude maker to go public as early as October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more. Anthropic has not confirmed the timing or valuation, but such a debut could surpass SpaceX’s record IPO valuation.
“If Anthropic is growing 800% a year, you’d think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue],” one investor told the FT. “That would make them a $3 trillion company.”
To put that in perspective, Anthropic has no direct publicly listed US peer to benchmark against. Investors pointed to AI-adjacent companies such as Palantir and Nebius, which have traded at roughly 55 times revenue this year, according to the FT. Those comparisons support the bullish case, although public investors may assign Anthropic a different multiple.
Anthropic has not confirmed a valuation or listing date. The company announced in June that it had confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC, but said the offering remained subject to regulatory review, market conditions, and other factors.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan are leading the offering, according to Quartz, a sign that this isn’t just investor chatter.
The challenges stack up
The bullish projections come despite mounting headwinds. In June, the Commerce Department temporarily banned Anthropic’s leading models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, under export controls.
Two investors told the FT that the episode measurably slowed revenue growth that month, though the company has since rebounded. The government relationship remains tense, with Anthropic still in active litigation against the Defense Department, which labeled the company a supply-chain risk earlier this year.
Then there’s the cost problem. Anthropic’s flagship model costs more than 2.5x as much to use as OpenAI’s, according to data from Artificial Analysis cited by the FT. Chinese open-weight alternatives are available at a fraction of the price and have improved dramatically this year.
What this means for OpenAI
If Anthropic goes first, OpenAI will be priced against a live competitor. But Evan Schlossberg, an OpenAI investor, sees a rising tide lifting all boats. “If you see strong, credible demand for investments in Anthropic and escalating premiums on that revenue, it would speak to a reasonable analogy that you’re seeing similar market trends for OpenAI,” he told Fortune.
Anthropic’s path to a $2 trillion valuation rests on investor projections rather than company disclosures. If its S-1 becomes public, the filing will allow investors and channel partners to test those assumptions against disclosed financial statements — and assess whether Anthropic can expand its partner ecosystem while competing on model pricing.
Read more: As Anthropic prepares for a potential public debut, see how its new Claude Partner Hub and services tiers could shape deployment opportunities for channel partners.