Anthropic’s $2 trillion dream

If Anthropic investors have their way, SpaceX won’t hold the title of biggest IPO in history for much longer. The Financial Times reported today that Anthropic’s backers are betting on an eye-popping $2 trillion valuation or more for the AI startup’s expected debut in October.

That figure sounds more like what a toddler would guess a house is worth before having a grasp of numbers than a reasonable valuation for a new public company. But the metrics the FT reported are pretty impressive: Anthropic’s projected annualized revenue could reach between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of this year, more than ten times higher than where it started 2026.

Anthropic, which filed paperwork with the SEC back in June, has yet to officially set a target valuation for its IPO. But the company is preparing itself for the big splash: Bloomberg reported yesterday that Anthropic is in talks to acquire Decart AI for roughly $6 billion, which would be its biggest acquisition ever. Decart has a software platform that makes AI chips more efficient, a useful tool as Anthropic splashes out billions of dollars on datacenters.

Don’t forget that Anthropic still faces a slew of hurdles: It’s competition isn’t just ChatGPT and other Silicon Valley LLMs, but cheaper models out of China. It also triggered the ire of the White House, and was forced to pull two models due to regulatory scrutiny in June after the Trump administration called the company a national security threat.

Optimism or overconfidence?

It feels like not that long ago that companies were holding off on going public, citing the choppy stock market and cloudy macroeconomic conditions. Now, the once-sleepy IPO market is seeing trillion-dollar-plus debuts from tech behemoths.

Part of this is simply due to SpaceX’s success. As PitchBook analyst Emily Zheng explained to Brew Markets ahead of SpaceX’s debut, all of the AI unicorns were watching how the public market digested SpaceX, and taking note. Now that Elon’s darling has proven that it can rally ongoing enthusiasm from investors, prospective IPOs like Anthropic and OpenAI have reason to be optimistic.

But optimism and $2 trillion worth of confidence are two very different things—and only time will tell what Anthropic is really worth.—LB