Business 4 min read By Callum Montgomery
Anthropic’s $2tn IPO Case Rests on Revenue Velocity
Backers are modelling a valuation of at least $2tn, more than twice Anthropic’s latest private valuation. The public market will have to decide whether extraordinary run-rate growth warrants an extraordinary multiple.
Anthropic’s prospective flotation is becoming a test of how public markets price a frontier AI company whose commercial scale is changing faster than conventional annual accounts can capture. Investors cited by the Financial Times expect the Claude maker to be worth $2tn or more at a possible October IPO, but the company itself has not set that price.
The formal process is real. Anthropic said on 1 June that it had confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It has not determined the number of shares or the offering price, and the transaction remains subject to market conditions. The FT separately reported that senior executives had not yet fixed a target valuation.
The hard private-market reference point is $965bn. On 28 May, Anthropic announced a $65bn Series H round at that post-money valuation. A $2tn flotation would therefore require the public market to accept more than a doubling in value within a few months.
The argument for that repricing is revenue velocity. Anthropic said its run-rate revenue crossed $47bn in May, while TechCrunch reported a figure of roughly $9bn at the end of 2025. For a business selling AI models and tools into enterprise workflows, that acceleration suggests a rapidly deepening commercial market rather than a purely experimental technology cycle.
Yet run-rate revenue is not the same as booked annual revenue. It extrapolates a recent sales pace across a full year. That makes it a useful leading indicator when growth is extreme, but it also embeds an assumption: that the current pace is representative enough to annualise.
The FT says investors expect annualised revenue to reach $100bn to $120bn by the end of 2026. Anthropic has not publicly presented that range as formal guidance. Investors are therefore applying valuation multiples to a forecasted run rate, not to a completed year of audited public-company accounts.
One shareholder’s model goes further. With growth around 800%, the investor argued that a revenue multiple near 30 times could imply a valuation around $3tn. Mathematically, $100bn multiplied by 30 produces that figure. Economically, the question is whether a public market would maintain such a multiple once the business must report costs, customer concentration, cash requirements and competitive pressures in full view.
Anthropic’s own May statement points to the other side of the equation. The company plans to use new capital to expand compute, products and partnerships, alongside safety and interpretability research. Frontier AI is software with unusually heavy infrastructure demands. Revenue can scale rapidly, but so can the need for chips, data centres and long-term capacity commitments.
That is why this IPO matters beyond one company. If investors accept a $2tn valuation, they will be signalling that exceptional AI growth can outweigh the sector’s capital intensity. If they demand a lower multiple, the result could reset private-market expectations across the industry.
The public S-1 should provide the missing bridge between the narrative and the economics. Until it appears, $965bn remains the last confirmed valuation, while $2tn and $3tn are competing investor models of what Anthropic could become.
