06 May 2026, USA, San Francisco: The Anthropic logo can be seen at an event organized by the AI company. Photo: Andrej Sokolow/dpa (Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images)
dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
Anthropic’s own executives have not put a number on what the company should be worth when it lists in October. Its shareholders have: more than $2 trillion. The Financial Times reported this week that investors in the Claude maker expect the largest initial public offering ever completed, a debut that would eclipse SpaceX’s record listing. At least one backer argues the math supports $3 trillion.
The company filed confidentially in June. What changed this week is the size of the number its owners are saying out loud.
The argument over whether that number is sane will run from now until the pricing date. The louder it gets, the less it will matter, because it cannot change what October actually does. For three years the AI trade has had no public price at its center. Every frontier lab has been valued in private rounds, by small groups of investors, a few times a year. In October, the market starts voting on one every day.
The Numbers Doing The Selling
The expectation rests on a revenue curve with no precedent in enterprise software. Anthropic’s annualized run rate was about $1 billion at the end of 2024 and roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. Then it went vertical:
Investors told the FT they now project $100 billion to $120 billion by December. The private market has already voted on this curve once: a $65 billion round in late May valued the company at $965 billion. Brad Gerstner of Altimeter has called the growth the fastest in technology history.
One clarification belongs next to every figure above. A run rate annualizes the most recent month’s sales pace into a full-year estimate. It is a momentum reading, not money in the bank. Anthropic has not booked $47 billion in a year. It was selling at that pace in May.
What $2 Trillion Is Buying
Meta booked $201 billion of revenue in 2025. Anthropic’s shareholders are asking public investors to put their company in that conversation on the strength of a curve, not a finished year. At $2 trillion, buyers would be paying for the version of Anthropic where Claude is embedded in enterprise workflows the way Meta is embedded in advertising budgets, with the pricing power to match. The business as it runs today does not carry that number on its own.
The bull case has simple arithmetic behind it. One investor put it to the FT plainly: growth of 800% a year justifies at least 30 times revenue, and against $100 billion of December pace that clears $3 trillion. That arithmetic is a bet that the growth lasts, and nothing on listing day can prove it will.
The 2012 Precedent
A platform company has arrived at the public market carrying this much certainty before, and it is the same company Anthropic keeps being measured against. Facebook priced at $38 a share in May 2012, a $104 billion valuation and the most anticipated listing of its era.
By September it traded below $18. The business underneath was growing the entire time; the mood was what collapsed. The stock needed 15 months to see $38 again. That same company now books $201 billion a year and serves 3.58 billion people a day.
Both of the market’s confident opinions about Facebook were wrong. The debut price was too hopeful for that first year and absurdly low for the decade that followed. Benjamin Graham’s old line is the cleanest description of what an IPO actually starts:
In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it is a weighing machine.
The first public price of a platform business measures the mood in the room. Only the years measure the business.
What Everything Else Trades Against
October prices more than Anthropic. The S-1, once public, converts three years of argument into audited line items: the real gross margin on selling intelligence, the actual size of the compute bill, the customers standing behind $47 billion of pace. Every private lab valuation, and every public company holding a lab stake, gets marked against that tape whether it wants to be or not.
The arguments are already running. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Anthropic’s pre-IPO meetings have turned into an exercise in shoring up confidence. Investors are pressing on which companies will lead in AI and on the financial strength of the model business. Those are questions a private company answers with a pitch. A public company answers them with filings, every quarter, from the day it lists.
The prospectus must become public at least 15 days before the roadshow, so the disclosure arrives within weeks. After that, two numbers do the talking. The first is the December run rate against the $100 billion to $120 billion its investors are projecting. The second is the gap between what the stock does in its first year and what the business does. If the Facebook precedent means anything, it is that the opening price will be argued about for weeks, and the business will settle the argument over years.