Anthropic's investors are telling the Financial Times they expect the AI startup to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, a figure that would make its debut the largest initial public offering in history and eclipse SpaceX's $1.77 trillion valuation from its June listing. Six of the company's backers described their expectations to the FT in a report picked up and confirmed independently by Ars Technica and Fortune.
The bullishness is rooted in revenue growth investors describe as extraordinary even by Silicon Valley standards. Backers expect Anthropic's annualized revenue — a measure the company calculates by projecting recent performance across a full year — to land between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026, more than tenfold what it was at the start of the year. The company said in May its annualized revenue had already surpassed $47 billion, and its valuation leapfrogged OpenAI's for the first time that month, reaching $965 billion after a fresh funding round. Venture firms, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional investors have poured just under $100 billion into Anthropic so far in 2026.
One investor's math, relayed to the FT, illustrates how aggressively some in Anthropic's cap table are pricing the offering:
If Anthropic is growing 800 percent a year, you'd think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times revenue. That would make them a $3 trillion company.
Unnamed Anthropic investor, quoted by the Financial Times
Anthropic lacks a direct publicly traded peer to benchmark against, though AI-adjacent companies such as Palantir and Nebius have traded this year at roughly 55 times revenue. Several investors cautioned that Anthropic's own executives have not yet settled on a target valuation, even in internal conversations — the $2 trillion-plus figure reflects investor modeling rather than company guidance. Anthropic filed confidential paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, which places it in a quiet period restricting what it can say publicly about its finances, and the company declined to comment to the FT.
Headwinds behind the bullish math
The rosy projections come despite real headwinds. Anthropic has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration, including over a temporary Commerce Department restriction on sales of its most advanced models that investors said contributed to slower revenue growth in June before the company rebounded. Competition from Chinese AI labs has intensified, and public markets have grown more cautious generally about sky-high AI valuations after a volatile stretch for tech stocks earlier this year.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan are leading the offering, and the October timeline gives Anthropic roughly two months to convert investor enthusiasm into an actual pricing range. If the deal lands anywhere near the levels its backers are projecting, it would reset expectations for what an AI-native company can command from public markets — and put immediate pressure on OpenAI's own IPO planning to match or beat it.
