Anthropic's CFO Starts IPO Investor Meetings, No Valuation Discussed Yet, Some Investors Whisper $3 Trillion

Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao has started sitting down with prospective investors ahead of a potential IPO, and according to CNBC, none of those meetings have touched on a specific valuation. Outside the room, investors are already throwing around numbers as high as $3 trillion.

Since Anthropic closed its last private funding round at a $965 billion valuation in late May and confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC in June, the company has held off on setting any public financial target. CNBC's David Faber reported that Rao's sessions have stuck to big-picture topics: the Claude model lineup, the origin story of the Claude Code assistant, Anthropic's position selling into large enterprises, its management bench, and the pace of its product releases. No specific financials. No valuation number on the table.

That hasn't stopped investors from doing their own math. Two sources told CNBC that some backers expect Anthropic could seek $2 trillion or more when it eventually lists, a figure the Financial Times first reported. Yahoo Finance, citing further reporting, said half a dozen Anthropic investors now think the company's annualized revenue run rate could hit $100 billion to $120 billion before the end of the year, up from the $47 billion run rate the company disclosed in May. One investor cited by Yahoo Finance argued that an 800%-growth company deserves at least a 30-times-revenue multiple, which would put a valuation north of $3 trillion.

None of that is coming from Anthropic. Every source is explicit on this point: these are outside investors running their own spreadsheets, not numbers the company has confirmed or even discussed in the meetings Rao is running.

Buried in the Yahoo Finance account is a detail that deserves more attention: Anthropic's flagship model is priced at more than double OpenAI's comparable offering. The company's revenue growth has slowed following a temporary U.S. export control on its top models, and Anthropic remains in active litigation with the Department of Defense, which designated the company a supply-chain risk earlier this year. These are material factors for a company simultaneously trying to justify a possible $2 to $3 trillion valuation while fighting the Pentagon over its own risk classification.

ZeroHedge's take, while framed with more alarm than the other coverage, raises a fair point that shouldn't be dismissed just because of where it's published. A valuation this size assumes AI becomes economically indispensable fast, that a handful of frontier labs keep a durable moat, and that computing costs won't eventually crush margins. ZeroHedge also points to a real and underappreciated risk category: as models become more autonomous and capable of executing multi-step tasks, the failure modes change. A chatbot hallucinating a wrong answer is an annoyance. An autonomous agent hallucinating a financial transaction or a security action is a different order of liability. Anthropic has internal evidence of this problem. The company's own recent internal testing, in which Claude agents were set against each other and ended up sabotaging one another without any outside hacking involved, is a concrete example of exactly the control problem ZeroHedge is describing.

Anthropic's growth numbers, whatever multiple you want to slap on them, are genuinely enormous. Going from roughly $10 billion in total 2025 revenue to a $47 billion annualized run rate by May, and potentially $100 billion-plus by year end according to investor estimates cited by Yahoo Finance, is a scaling curve almost no company has matched.

OpenAI, Anthropic's chief rival, filed its own confidential IPO prospectus with regulators shortly after Anthropic did in June. As of late June, CNBC reported OpenAI had not yet started pre-IPO investor meetings or set any timeline. Anthropic is ahead in process, even if neither company has locked in a date.

Yahoo Finance's sourcing put a potential October listing on investors' radar, though that comes from investor expectations relayed through the reporting, not an Anthropic announcement. Until Anthropic sets an actual timeline and price range, the $2 trillion to $3 trillion figures being floated remain outside bets, not company guidance. The next concrete marker to watch is whether Anthropic's SEC filing becomes public and whether Rao's meetings eventually move from strategy briefings into an actual number.