Surpassing SpaceX, Anthropic's valuation may exceed 2 trillion US dollars
On August 13, according to multiple sources from investment institutions, Anthropic, the world's leading artificial intelligence enterprise, is set to go public as early as October this year at the soonest, with some investors expecting its post-listing valuation to reach $2 trillion or even higher. If this target is finally met, Anthropic will surpass SpaceX's previous record of $1.77 trillion IPO valuation and become the largest initial public offering in global history.
At present, Anthropic has confidentially submitted its S-1 prospectus to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on June 1, entering the quiet period, and launched institutional intention survey work in collaboration with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase. At that time, the market generally expected its listing valuation to be around $1 trillion, which was basically in line with the valuation level of its private financing in May. Just over two months later, investors' expectations have doubled directly, mainly driven by its explosive revenue growth that far exceeded expectations.
Anthropic's annualized revenue started at $1 billion in January 2025, climbed to $9 billion by the end of 2025, reached $14 billion in February 2026, exceeded $30 billion in April, and broke through the $47 billion mark in May, achieving 47-fold growth in less than 18 months. Its actual revenue growth rate in the first quarter of 2026 was as high as 80 times, far exceeding the company's internal forecast of 10 times; its second-quarter revenue reached $10.9 billion, and it achieved adjusted operating profit of $559 million for the first time, turning profitable two years earlier than the forecast the company gave to investors.
The most aggressive expectation from investors is that by the end of 2026, Anthropic's annualized revenue will reach $100 billion to $120 billion, representing a more than 10-fold increase from the beginning of this year. Calculated on this basis, the $2 trillion valuation corresponds to a price-to-sales ratio of about 17 to 20 times; referring to the current valuation level of AI and software companies in the U.S. stock market, high-growth leading enterprises generally have a price-to-sales ratio of around 30 times; if Anthropic's annual revenue growth rate can reach 800%, even under conservative estimates, the enterprise's valuation should reach 30 times its revenue, corresponding to a market capitalization of up to $3 trillion.
What supports Anthropic's rapid revenue growth is its rapid breakthrough in the enterprise-level AI market. Unlike OpenAI, which focuses more on the C-end consumer market, Anthropic has focused on enterprise customers and security compliance scenarios since its inception. Its Claude series of large models have quickly secured leading global enterprise customers with their ultra-long context window, stable security alignment capability and excellent code generation performance.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude Code programming assistant launched by Anthropic in 2026 have become phenomenal products. Among them, the annualized revenue run rate of the single product Claude Code has exceeded $2.5 billion, making it a mainstream tool in the developer community. Market research data shows that as of the second quarter of 2026, Anthropic's share in the enterprise-level large model API market has reached 32%, surpassing OpenAI's 25% for the first time and ranking first in the industry. Giants such as Amazon, Google, JPMorgan Chase and Salesforce are all its core customers.
It is worth noting that Anthropic is an AI startup that has been established for only five years. In 2021, a group of researchers who left OpenAI founded Anthropic, which received $300 million in seed investment from Google in the early stage of its establishment. In 2023, Amazon announced that it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, becoming its important strategic shareholder and computing power partner, and the subsequent investment quota was gradually increased to $8 billion; Google also continued to follow up the investment, with a cumulative investment of more than $1 billion.
Entering 2026, the company's financing pace has accelerated sharply: it completed a $30 billion Series G financing in February, led by GIC and Coatue, with a post-money valuation rising to $380 billion; just three months later in May, it completed another $65 billion Series H financing, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and HSG, with a post-money valuation reaching $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI in one fell swoop to become the world's most valuable AI startup. Since the beginning of the year, the total amount of funds invested in Anthropic by various institutions has approached $1 trillion.
Faced with the sky-high valuation of $2 trillion, there are also doubts in the market. Some views point out that Anthropic's high revenue has benefited to a certain extent from subsidies from upstream computing power manufacturers and procurement support from strategic investors, and part of its revenue is of related transaction nature, so the quality of fully market-oriented growth remains to be verified. At the same time, there are also rising computing power costs. Although the unit inference cost continues to decline under the effect of scale, the investment in training the next generation of cutting-edge models is still rising exponentially, and the sustainability of profitability has not been tested through a complete cycle.
Data from Artificial Analysis shows that the invocation cost of Anthropic's main model is more than 2.5 times that of OpenAI's flagship product, while the cost of China's open source model is only a small part of the former; some enterprise customers have turned to more affordable alternatives. In the future, once the release rhythm of enterprise AI demand slows down, Anthropic's valuation will face the risk of substantial correction.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Jiemian News", written by Li Kefeng, and published with authorization by 36Kr.