Report

Anthropic: Investors Expect IPO Valuation of $2 Trillion, More Than SpaceX

co-written by eustella AI13. August 2026, 13:28

Dario Amodei, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Anthropic. © World Economic Forum / Sandra Blaser

Anthropic could be valued at $2 trillion or more in its planned October IPO. That is according to the Financial Times, which cites half a dozen investors in the AI company. A listing at that level would be the largest ever and would exceed SpaceX, which went public in June at $1.77 trillion. It would also be more than a doubling of Anthropic’s current valuation; earlier media reports had put the target at around $1 trillion.

The number is far from fixed, however. Several investors told the FT that Anthropic’s senior executives had not named a valuation target even in private conversations – the investors are working from their own financial models. Anthropic filed paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in June, placing it in a quiet period that sharply limits public statements about its business performance. The company declined to comment on the report.

Why investors are applying such high multiples

The driver behind the valuation case is the pace of growth. One investor did the math for the FT: at annual growth of roughly 800 percent, even a very conservative multiple of 30 times revenue would be plausible – which would work out to a $3 trillion company.

There is no directly comparable US-listed peer for Anthropic. Companies seen as AI beneficiaries serve as a proxy: data analytics group Palantir and cloud provider Nebius have traded this year at roughly 55 times revenue.

Revenue growth: from $9 billion to more than $100 billion

Anthropic reports its revenue on an annualised basis, extrapolating full-year sales from recent performance. That run rate stood at around $9 billion at the end of 2025. It passed $30 billion in spring 2026, and in May the company said it had crossed $47 billion. On a quarterly basis, revenue rose from $4.8 billion in the first quarter to almost $11 billion in the second, according to the FT.

For the end of 2026, backers expect an annualised rate of $100 billion to $120 billion – more than a tenfold increase over the course of the year.

That growth is being underwritten from outside: venture capital funds, sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors have poured just under $100 billion into the company in 2026 alone.

When Anthropic passed OpenAI

Anthropic overtook its larger rival OpenAI in two respects during 2026.

On revenue, this happened in spring 2026: Anthropic reported an annualised run rate of more than $30 billion, while OpenAI stood at around $24 billion to $25 billion (roughly $2 billion in monthly revenue, by its own account). The decisive factor was the difference in strategy: Anthropic focuses on business customers and API usage, while OpenAI’s growth is driven largely by its consumer product ChatGPT. When Anthropic announced its Series G round in February 2026, it counted more than 500 enterprise customers each spending over $1 million a year; a few weeks later there were more than 1,000. Research group Epoch AI had predicted the revenue crossover back in February 2026, though it had expected it around the middle of the year.

On valuation, Anthropic moved ahead of OpenAI for the first time in May 2026, reaching $965 billion including the money raised at the time.

OpenAI remains well ahead on users. Anthropic does not disclose figures for Claude’s user base; Statista estimated it at around 245 million monthly users as of June 2026. ChatGPT passed the 1 billion user mark in May.

The risks ahead of the listing

The bullish projections run up against a series of open issues:

Conflict with the US government: Anthropic remains in litigation with the US Department of Defense, which labelled the company a supply-chain risk this year.
Export controls: In June, Anthropic had to briefly pull its top models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after being hit with export controls by the US Commerce Department. The restrictions were lifted after a little over two weeks, but the episode unsettled customers, according to the FT, and revenue growth in the month of June came in weaker. Growth subsequently rebounded.
Price pressure: Anthropic’s leading model costs more than two and a half times as much to use as OpenAI’s flagship, according to Artificial Analysis, while Chinese open-weight alternatives cost a fraction of that.
Budget ceilings among business customers: Data from payments group Ramp shows Anthropic gaining market share among US businesses, but companies are hitting their limits on AI spending and switching to cheaper models. In some cases, internal directives to maximise AI use have been reversed.
Regulation and competition: Added to that are pressure for AI regulation and rapidly improving Chinese rivals.