Markets AUG 18, 2026

Anthropic backers push for $2T October IPO, largest ever, on $100B–$120B run rate

The Claude maker last priced at $965B in May; a $2T listing would top SpaceX's June debut and mark a tenfold revenue jump from $47B annualized.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Anthropic’s backers are pushing for a $2 trillion-or-higher valuation at the company’s October debut, which would make it the largest IPO ever priced and eclipse SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion June listing by a wide margin. About half a dozen investors described the target to the Financial Times, framing it against an annualized revenue expectation of $100 billion to $120 billion by year-end.

That revenue figure is where the arithmetic gets vertiginous. Quartz reported a $47 billion run rate as recently as May. Forge Global pegged annualized revenue at $30 billion in April. Reaching $100B–$120B by December implies a more-than-tenfold expansion compressed into roughly two quarters, and it’s the load-bearing assumption underneath the $2T number.

The private-market context is stacked. Anthropic closed its Series H-1 at a $965 billion post-money valuation in May, raising $65 billion just 11 weeks after a February Series G priced the company at $380 billion. Dragoneer, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed led the H-1. A confidential IPO filing followed on June 1, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley leading an offering Forge expects to raise more than $60 billion on the Nasdaq.

Internally, the posture is more restrained. CFO Krishna Rao is running early investor meetings and, per CNBC, hasn’t discussed valuation. FT sources told Quartz that senior executives haven’t fixed a target even in private. The $2T number is a buy-side artifact, not a company statement, and the gap matters.

The risks travel with the ambition. Anthropic’s flagship Claude model is priced more than 2.5 times OpenAI’s comparable offering, per Artificial Analysis, at a moment when Ramp payments data shows enterprise buyers hitting spend ceilings and rotating toward cheaper alternatives, including Chinese open-weight models. Revenue growth slowed in June after the U.S. Commerce Department imposed a temporary export control on top models, and Anthropic is in active litigation with the Department of Defense, which has designated it a supply-chain risk.

Eight of the Fortune 10 are customers, which is the counterweight investors point to. It’s also the entire cushion. Markets registered a shrug on the report: the S&P 500 rose 0.26%. The valuation being floated would rewrite the ceiling for AI-economy equities; the revenue assumption it rests on would rewrite what a two-quarter ramp is supposed to look like.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.