Source: Jin10 Data
According to the Financial Times, some Anthropic investors expect the company to go public as early as October this year, with a valuation of $2 trillion or more. This figure doubles the previous preliminary target of around $1 trillion, but Anthropic has not yet finalized its IPO valuation.
If this expectation materializes, Anthropic’s IPO valuation will exceed SpaceX’s approximately $1.77 trillion IPO valuation, making it the largest IPO in history. Previously, foreign media reported that Anthropic secretly filed its U.S. IPO application in June, but the offering size and specific terms have not yet been disclosed.
Investors dared to double their valuation expectations, primarily based on revenue. Anthropic's revenue for the second quarter of this year reportedly approached $11 billion, more than doubling from $4.8 billion in the first quarter.
By the end of May, after completing a $65 billion funding round, Anthropic’s post-money valuation reached $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI. At the time, the company disclosed that its annualized revenue for May had already exceeded $470 billion.
Investors are currently projecting more aggressive expectations: by the end of 2026, Anthropic’s annualized revenue could reach $100 billion to $120 billion, more than ten times its level at the beginning of this year. This means the company must more than double its annualized revenue again between May and the end of the year.
The $2 trillion bet is on continued rapid revenue growth.
At an annualized revenue range of $100 billion to $120 billion, a $2 trillion valuation corresponds to approximately a 17 to 20x revenue multiple. For Anthropic to justify this valuation, it cannot rely solely on increased user numbers for Claude; more importantly, it depends on whether enterprise customers continue to expand their AI spending.
Anthropic has not publicly disclosed the official user base for Claude. Statista estimates that as of June this year, Claude had approximately 245 million monthly users worldwide, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT had surpassed 1 billion users during the same period.
Despite a significant gap in user numbers, Anthropic’s valuation once surpassed OpenAI’s this year. A key reason behind this is that Anthropic is gaining more enterprise customers, who typically generate higher revenue per customer.
This advantage is also facing increasingly direct cost competition. According to Reuters, some models developed by Chinese manufacturers are steadily approaching the capabilities of leading U.S. proprietary models in tasks such as coding, while offering significantly lower usage costs, prompting companies to reconsider whether they must pay premium prices for the most advanced models.
Marc Bhargava, General Catalyst’s Managing Director, noted that many core operational tasks do not require the most advanced models, and companies will ultimately return to questions of return on investment. However, for high-difficulty tasks such as coding, he expects Anthropic and OpenAI to maintain their advantage.
Anthropic has recently begun intensive communications with potential investors. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company is addressing challenges such as competition from low-cost models, tensions with the U.S. government, and the costs of data center construction.
Government relations have already directly impacted Anthropic’s business. Earlier this year, the U.S. government temporarily banned Anthropic from exporting two high-performance cybersecurity models due to security concerns; the restriction was lifted after slightly more than two weeks.
The Financial Times, citing investors, said the restriction once hampered Anthropic’s June revenue, but after the ban was lifted, the company’s revenue recovered at an “unusually rapid” pace. Meanwhile, Anthropic continues to be embroiled in ongoing legal disputes with the U.S. government over whether its products can be officially used by government agencies.
Nearly $100 billion in funding entered this year, making computing power another arena of competition.
On the other side of rapid revenue growth is Anthropic’s need to continuously increase its compute investment. Previously, the company had to restrict certain services during peak demand periods due to insufficient capacity, and infrastructure supply has now begun to directly impact how much additional demand Claude can handle.
Since the beginning of this year, nearly $100 billion in funding from venture capital firms, technology companies, and institutional investors has been invested in Anthropic. In addition to expanding its model training and inference infrastructure, the company plans to develop its own AI chips to alleviate long-term computational supply pressures.
In July, AMD pledged a $5 billion investment in Anthropic. The partnership will provide Anthropic with 2 GW of computing power powered by AMD's latest-generation chips.
Amazon announced in April an additional investment of $25 billion in Anthropic. As part of the partnership, Anthropic will continue to extensively use Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure, with cloud service expenditures exceeding $100 billion.
Anthropic is also reported to be in talks to acquire Decart AI, an AI infrastructure company backed by NVIDIA, in a potential deal worth approximately $6 billion. Decart primarily develops AI infrastructure and inference optimization technologies; if the deal is completed, its team is expected to join Anthropic’s inference and performance division.
These actions mean that the competition Anthropic faces before going public is no longer limited to who can train more capable models. Reasoning costs, chip supply, data center capacity, and the ability to consistently secure capital will all impact its ability to truly convert model demand into revenue.
For investors, the most important data in the coming months remains revenue. Anthropic’s second-quarter revenue has increased from $4.8 billion in the first quarter to nearly $11 billion, but achieving its year-end target of $100 billion to $120 billion in annualized revenue means growth cannot slow significantly.
If Anthropic proceeds with its IPO as planned in October, the official filing will for the first time allow public market investors to see the AI company’s actual revenue growth rate, enterprise customer base, infrastructure spending, and capital consumption—just five years after its founding.
At that time, the market will also be able to more directly determine whether the $2 trillion valuation is based on actual, deliverable growth or if investors have already paid extremely high revenue multiples for AI demand over the coming years.