Anthropic investors are salivating over the AI giant’s forthcoming IPO, expecting a jaw-dropping valuation of at least $2 trillion — blowing past the record set by Elon Musk’s SpaceX earlier this summer.
The Dario Amodei-led AI lab’s surging revenue could allow it to more than double its current valuation in its IPO, which is expected around October, half a dozen investors in the company told the Financial Times. If the company pulls off such a lofty listing, Anthropic’s early check writers would rake in billions of dollars in profits
The rosy projections – aided by a recent charm offensive from Amodei – come as Anthropic has been navigating thorny challenges like rising competition from Chinese rivals, looming AI regulation and a rocky relationship with the White House. The markets have also grown skittish about the huge expenditures fueling the AI boom and questions about whether the investments will pay off.
Recently, reports of Anthropic models going rogue, trying to hack into other companies and using fake online identities have fanned safety concerns around potential AI risks.
Still, Anthropic investors reportedly expect the San Francisco company’s annualized revenue to be between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026 — up more than tenfold this year.
“If Anthropic is growing 800% a year, you’d think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue],” one investor told the FT. “That would make them a $3 [trillion ]company.”
The investors – who have built their own financial models to project Anthropic’s worth – say the high demand for Anthropic’s advanced AI models and coding tools justifies their valuation expectations, which are based on recent performance.
Part of the challenge in determining the value of the five-year-old company is that no publicly traded business exists to provide a benchmark for its valuation. The closest comparison are companies that have been boosted by AI such as data intelligence firm Palantir and cloud company Nebius, which have traded at about 55 times their revenue this year.
Anthropic in June filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission that has put the company in a so-called quiet period curtailing public announcements about its financial performance.
Venture capitalists, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and other institutional investors have plowed nearly $100 billion into Anthropic this year alone. In May, Anthropic surpassed Sam Altman’s OpenAI – which was first to kick off the AI boom nearly five years ago, when it released ChatGPT. That month, Anthropic said annualized revenue had surpassed $47 billion.
Anthropic has focused on sales to enterprise clients and has released models that have outperformed those from rivals OpenAI and Google.
Anthropic also weathered a temporary Commerce Department ban on its best models, slowing its overall revenue growth in June, according to the FT. Anthropic was forced to briefly pull its leading models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 due to export controls after being labelled a supply-chain risk. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ended the standoff later that month when he lifted the controls.