Can Anthropic Stage the Largest IPO in History at Over $2tn?

As Anthropic prepares for its stock market debut, investors anticipate a valuation exceeding $2 trillion, potentially surpassing Elon Musk’s SpaceX record for the largest IPO earlier this year.

According to the Financial Times, which consulted half a dozen of the company’s backers, Anthropic investors expect the AI startup to float at a valuation of US$2tn or more in October.

This could mark the second record-breaking IPO of the year. SpaceX's massive debut valued the aerospace firm at approximately US$1.77tn, knocking Aramco’s 2019 US$1.7tn valuation off the top spot.

Amid skyrocketing growth in the US tech sector and compounding fears of a financial bubble emanating from the AI world, Anthropic – which leads in most benchmarks for frontier models – is looking to make its mark on the global stock market.

The biggest IPO in history (again)?

In May, Anthropic raised US$65bn in Series H funding led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, giving it a post-money valuation of US$965bn.

Anthropic highlighted that its run-rate revenue crossed US$47bn in May. That figure has jumped 47-fold, from about US$1bn in annual recurring revenue in early 2025, according to a Forbes report.

Investors that recently spoke with the FT expect the AI firm's annualised revenue to be between US$100bn and US$120bn by the end of 2026, using the start-up’s preferred measure, which infers full-year sales from recent performance, which is up by more than 10 times over the course of 2026.

"If Anthropic is growing 800 per cent a year, you’d think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue]," one investor in the group told the FT. "That would make them a US$3tn company."

OpenAI and Anthropic are steering the global gen AI market toward an unprecedented trillion-dollar public era. Credit: Getty Images

Anthropic’s stellar performance

Anthropic has gained ground in the world of frontier AI, despite a disagreement with the US government earlier this year which saw it labelled a supply chain risk.

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei made clear in March that the spat was over autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, stating: "Our only concerns have been our exceptions on fully-autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, which relate to high-level usage areas, and not operational decision-making."

Yet the political friction has done little to slow the firm’s technological momentum.

Its models still outperform competitors such as OpenAI across a variety of benchmarks, according to Artificial Analysis’s Comparison of Models: Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis.

Anthropic models still outperform competitors across a variety of benchmarks. Credit: Artificial Analysis

The independent platform, which analyses the performance of AI models, currently holds Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 (max) and Claude Opus 5 (xhigh) as the highest intelligence models, followed by Claude Fable 5 (with fallback) and Claude Opus 5 (high).

Its LLM leaderboard has Anthropic’s models in the top four spots, closely followed by models from OpenAI, Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI and the Chinese firm Moonshot’s Kimi K3.

Arguably, this sustained technical lead remains the core engine driving Anthropic’s extraordinary revenue trajectory and soaring valuation.

Compounding AI bubble fears

Robert Farago, Head of Strategic Asset Allocation at financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown, wrote in a July blog for the company: "The AI story provides the fertile ground needed for a bubble to grow: a transformational technology with unknown winners.

Robert Farago, Head of Strategic Asset Allocation at Hargreaves Lansdown. Credit: Robert Farago/LinkedIn

“The market today ticks a couple of the items on the checklist above too. The best-performing stocks have seen rising volatility. The IPO of SpaceX raised billions from retail investors – and institutions too. It’s said Anthropic and OpenAI are planning to follow soon.”

He added: “So, my judgement is that we may well be in bubble territory. It could be in its early stages, or it could be about to burst.”

A Reuters report from July noted that bonds of the companies driving the AI boom have been under strain, pushing up the cost of insuring debt issued by companies such as Oracle, NVIDIA, and Apple.

Demand for AI-linked credit default swaps has surged, Reuters noted. The move reflects ‌growing concern among investors about when the billions of dollars being poured into AI will generate returns.

Notably, credit default swaps were the main tool used by the famous US investor Michael Burry (immortalised in the book and film The Big Short) who predicted and profited from the 2008 housing crisis, to bet against subprime mortgage bonds.