Anthropic Investors Eye $2 Trillion to $3 Trillion IPO Valuation, Aiming to Beat SpaceX's Record

Since Anthropic confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC on June 1, investor chatter has escalated fast. Half a dozen backers now tell the Financial Times they expect the Claude developer to seek a valuation of $2 trillion, with some projecting as high as $3 trillion when it prices as soon as October.

That would exceed SpaceX's benchmark. Elon Musk's company priced its June IPO at $135 a share, raised $75 billion, and landed a valuation of roughly $1.77 trillion, the largest IPO in history, according to Bloomberg data. Shares later climbed above $225 intraday before settling near $142.

Anthropic hasn't confirmed any of this. Investor briefings led by Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao have specifically avoided the valuation question, according to Bloomberg, and a company representative did not respond to requests for comment from multiple outlets, including Morningstar and Bloomberg.

The revenue case

The numbers driving investor enthusiasm are real, not vapor. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate hit $47 billion in May, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 and just $1 billion in December 2024, according to the Financial Times and confirmed by multiple sources tied to the company's $65 billion Series H round.

Preliminary second-quarter revenue came in above $11.5 billion, compared to $787 million in the same quarter a year earlier, Bloomberg reported. Investors now expect the annualized run rate to reach $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of 2026.

Claude Code, the company's agentic coding tool, is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. It launched in May 2025, hit $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months, and crossed $8 billion by May 2026, according to memeburn, now commanding roughly 54% of the AI coding market.

Enterprise adoption backs this up independently. Data from Ramp cited by Morningstar shows 43.5% of U.S. businesses paid for Anthropic subscriptions or tokens last month, compared to 39.7% for OpenAI and 6.2% for Google.

The case against the number

The strongest pushback deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved off. One investor told the Financial Times that a company growing at roughly 800% annually could justify a 30x revenue multiple, which on a $100 billion run rate produces $3 trillion. But Fortune ran a different calculation, reported by Vested Finance: at multiples typical for large, mature Nasdaq companies, Anthropic would need annual profits of $59 billion to $79 billion to justify a $2 trillion price tag.

Anthropic isn't close. The company posted a net loss of nearly $42 billion in 2025, roughly five times the $8.3 billion it lost in 2024, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. Its second quarter of 2026 was reportedly the first time it posted positive adjusted operating income at all, still a long way from net income.

For comparison, Amazon earned $62.6 billion in net income on $200.6 billion of quarterly revenue, Vested Finance noted. Anthropic is being asked to justify a valuation on the scale of Amazon's while running a multibillion-dollar annual loss.

Revenue multiples applied to AI-adjacent stocks like Palantir and Nebius, which trade near 55x revenue, get cited by bulls as proof $2 trillion is conservative. But that comparison cuts both ways: it says what the market has paid for other names, not what it should pay for Anthropic specifically.

Timing and structure

There's a hard deadline in play for anyone betting on this outcome. Crypto Briefing reported that prediction market Polymarket, tracking which company will hold the largest 2026 IPO by market cap, gives SpaceX roughly 55% odds and Anthropic 44-45%, a dramatic shift from SpaceX's 94% lead just months ago. If Anthropic's IPO slips past December 31, the market resolves in SpaceX's favor automatically, regardless of valuation.

Anthropic is also reportedly considering super-voting shares for co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, who holds about 2% of the company, and his fellow founders, according to The Next Web. That would let Amodei retain outsized control even as outside shareholders write nine- and ten-figure checks with no say in governance, a structure common among Silicon Valley founders going public but one investors should weigh alongside the valuation debate.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are working on the listing, The Next Web reported, and a revolving credit facility is set to close above its $10 billion target. Anthropic buys computing capacity from SpaceX under a multiyear agreement reportedly worth tens of billions, meaning a public Anthropic would be matching the valuation trajectory of one of its own suppliers.

US IPOs have raised $160.6 billion through August 19, according to The Next Web, still short of 2021's record $195.2 billion. Whether Anthropic prices in October near $2 trillion, higher, or scales back after a full audited look at its books remains an open question the confidential S-1 process is designed not to answer until filing goes public.