❯ Anthropic May IPO at $2 Trillion Valuation; Banks Say Raise Could Top $100 Billion

RAISING TERMSAccording to The New York Times, Anthropic’s underwriting banks have given potential investors a line in recent talks: the Claude developer’s initial public offering could raise more than $100 billion, at a valuation of $2 trillion. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan — Wall Street’s three biggest banks — are leading, and several investors expect the issuance window to fall in October.

VALUATIONThat figure is higher than any guidance the company itself has ever offered — Anthropic executives haven’t confirmed a valuation target even in private, and $2 trillion is what the banks and investors circling the deal have calculated. The reference point is this May’s funding round, reportedly valued at $965 billion; in other words, on the reported basis, it would double within a few months.

REVENUEUnderpinning the price is the revenue trajectory. In May, the company disclosed annualized revenue of $47 billion; six investors told Reuters it could reach $100 billion to $120 billion by year-end, with a 2028 target range of $190 billion to $200 billion. On the year-end basis, a $2 trillion valuation implies roughly 17x price-to-sales — absurdly high for a software company, but not so absurd for one growing tenfold.

RECORD & PRESSUREIf it actually prices at that level, it would knock off the $1.77 trillion record SpaceX set this June and become the largest IPO in history. The more practical impact lands on the pricing framework for secondary-market investors: a company that was still raising in private rounds last year will, starting tomorrow, be pressed on gross margin, compute spend, and inference costs at the public market’s quarterly cadence. The phrase quarterly report is an entirely new constraint for frontier labs.

▪ SIGNALThe $2 trillion figure currently exists only in conversations between the banks and investors — the company hasn’t acknowledged a word of it. The real pricing happens the day the prospectus discloses compute spending.