Anthropic investors are penciling in numbers that would have sounded absurd twelve months ago. Half a dozen backers told the Financial Times they expect the Claude maker to float at $2 trillion or more this October — a debut that would eclipse SpaceX and become the largest IPO in history. That’s more than double the startup’s current valuation, and it hinges on a revenue trajectory that defies gravity even by Silicon Valley standards.
The math, as one investor framed it, is straightforward: if Anthropic keeps growing at 800 percent annually, a conservative 30x revenue multiple yields a $3 trillion company. Backers point to annualized revenue hitting somewhere between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026, using the startup’s preferred run-rate measure. For context, Palantir and Nebius — the closest public-market proxies for AI demand — are trading around 55 times revenue. Anthropic would be getting a relative discount at 30x, which tells you how detached from reality the baseline assumptions have become.
Not that there aren’t real headwinds. The Commerce Department’s temporary ban on Anthropic’s best models dented revenue growth in June, according to two investors familiar with the numbers. Chinese competition is intensifying, regulators are circling, and the company’s relationship with the US government remains tense. The investors acknowledged all of this. They also said the slowdown was temporary and growth rebounded quickly — extraordinary even by the standards of a sector that routinely posts triple-digit expansion.
What’s striking is that Anthropic executives haven’t actually committed to a valuation target, even in private conversations. Investors are running their own models and arriving at these figures independently, which means the $2 trillion number is as much a reflection of FOMO as fundamentals. The question public markets will have to answer this fall: are they willing to pay SpaceX-plus prices for a five-year-old company whose best models can be temporarily banned by the government with a memo? If the answer is yes, the AI bubble has a lot more room to inflate. If not, October could be the moment the music stops.
