# Can Anthropic Top $2T in IPO? Investors Bet Claude Maker Will Eclipse SpaceX in Record-Breaking Debut > Source: > Published: 2026-08-14 09:06:13+00:00 # Can Anthropic Top $2T in IPO? Investors Bet Claude Maker Will Eclipse SpaceX in Record-Breaking Debut ## IDC puts current revenue near $50B, half of what backers forecast by December Investors in Anthropic are modelling a stock market debut worth $2T (£1.48T) or more. The company that would have to justify that price has not settled on a number of its own. Half a dozen backers of the Claude maker told the *Financial Times* they expect the [Anthropic IPO](https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anthropic-ipo-ai-investment-1813702) to come in October at $2T or above, the largest initial public offering ever completed. Senior executives have not fixed a valuation target even in private, according to the newspaper, leaving shareholders to model it themselves. Anthropic said in May that its annualised run rate had passed $47B (£34.8B). Backers now expect that figure to end 2026 between $100B (£74.1B) and $120B (£88.9B), more than 10 times where the company began the year. One investor told the *FT* that a business growing 800% a year would trade at 30 times revenue 'at the incredibly low end,' which works out near $3T (£2.22T). The record is two months old. [SpaceX](https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/spacex-10-trillion-company-peter-diamandis-1812460) sold 555.6 million shares at $135 on 11 June, raising $75B (£55.6B) at a valuation of about $1.77T (£1.31T). The stock rose 19% in its first Nasdaq session the next day, lifting the market value to roughly $2.1T (£1.56T). ## Inside the Revenue Gap Behind the Anthropic IPO Independent estimates land nowhere near that. Research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) puts [Anthropic](https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anthropic-ipo-ai-investment-1813702)'s current annualised revenue at $40B (£29.6B) to $50B (£37B), with consumer subscriptions contributing under $2B (£1.5B). Most of the money comes from enterprise seats, Claude Code, and API consumption. 'Usage scale tells a different story from revenue mix,' IDC research vice-president Arnal Dayaratna said in June, setting Claude's 40 million to 60 million weekly users against more than 900 million for ChatGPT. The headline number carries a caveat. Anthropic reports run rate on a gross basis, counting the full spend of enterprise customers who reach Claude through Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, rather than the share it keeps. Audited accounts will not be public until a prospectus is. No directly comparable US company is listed, so there is no obvious yardstick. Investors have borrowed multiples from AI beneficiaries such as Palantir and the cloud group Nebius, both trading at about 55 times sales. Anthropic closed a $65B (£48.1B) Series H on 28 May at a $965B (£715B) post-money valuation, passing OpenAI's $852B (£631B) for the first time. Close to $100B has flowed in from venture funds, sovereign wealth, and institutional money this year. It filed a confidential draft S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on 1 June and has been quiet since. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase are working on the deal. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives called the filing 'an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market,' quiet for years before this run of listings. OpenAI filed confidentially the same month but is now looking at 2027, Bloomberg has reported, leaving Anthropic on course to be the first frontier AI lab to report quarterly earnings. ## Why Washington Still Shadows the Anthropic IPO The company is in open conflict with its own government. President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic technology on 27 February. The Pentagon then designated the firm a supply chain risk, a label formalised in early March. Talks had broken down over Anthropic's refusal to let Claude be used for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons. Anthropic sued on 9 March. A San Francisco judge blocked the federal ban in late March, though an appeals court refused to pause the supply chain label in early April. Export controls followed. The Commerce Department ordered Anthropic on 12 June to cut off foreign nationals from its newly released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. Unable to verify nationality in real time, the company withdrew both worldwide. The controls were lifted on 30 June. Investors told the *FT* that June growth slowed before the business recovered. Price is the quieter problem. Anthropic's leading model costs more than 2.5 times OpenAI's flagship, according to Artificial Analysis, while Chinese open-weight rivals undercut both by a wide margin. None of it is fixed. There is no public prospectus, no date, no price range, and no ticker. The numbers circulating this week are shareholders', not the company's. © Copyright IBTimes 2025. All rights reserved.