Six investors in Anthropic expect the company to come to market in October at a valuation of around $2 trillion, according to the Financial Times, which reported the figure on August 13.
The number is theirs, not the company’s. Senior executives have not set a valuation target, the paper reported, even in private conversations, and the listing is still under discussion. The investors appear to have built their own models in the absence of guidance.
Those models start from growth. Anthropic reported an annualized revenue run rate of $47 billion in May, and its backers expect $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of this year. One put the arithmetic plainly: “If Anthropic is growing 800 per cent a year, you’d think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times” revenue.
It would roughly double what the private market last paid. Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H on May 28 at a post-money valuation of $965 billion, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, then filed confidentially for a listing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were selected to lead the offering, with JPMorgan also named.
The benchmark is SpaceX, which went public in June and carried Elon Musk’s xAI onto the public markets with it, making the first frontier model developer a listed asset by absorption. SpaceX sold 555,555,555 shares at $135 to raise $75 billion, the largest amount ever raised in an IPO, for a valuation above $1.77 trillion. A $2 trillion Anthropic would exceed that valuation. How much stock it would sell, and whether the offering itself would beat SpaceX’s raise, has not been reported.
Against the growth case sit costs the company has been absorbing in public. Anthropic’s flagship model is more than two and a half times the price of OpenAI’s, and some enterprise buyers have begun capping AI budgets or shifting work to cheaper systems. Chinese labs are pricing aggressively into the same demand.
Its commitments are also large and lengthening. Anthropic moved its next data centers into a venture owned by Macquarie and GIC on August 10, taking the anchor tenant’s seat rather than the owner’s, and agreed to cover consumer electricity price increases at those sites. Broadcom, Apollo and Blackstone assembled a $35 billion financing structure for its next gigawatt of compute in June. Nvidia signed memorandums on August 10 to mobilize more than $500 billion for customers buying its hardware, secured against the compute itself.
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team