Anthropic could be heading toward an IPO as soon as October, and some investors believe the AI company could be worth $2 trillion or more once it goes public, according to people who spoke with the Financial Times.
Such a valuation would make Anthropic’s IPO the largest public offering on record, while putting the company at the forefront of a market that has become increasingly cautious about AI spending and valuations.
Much of the optimism comes down to Anthropic’s fast-growing revenue. Investors expect its annualized revenue to climb to between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026. The company said in May that it had already passed $47 billion.
One investor told the Financial Times that if Anthropic keeps growing at 800% a year, even a 30-times-revenue valuation would put the company at around $3 trillion.
Anthropic has not announced a valuation target for the offering, while several investors said senior executives have not shared one privately. As a result, investors have been building their own estimates using enterprise sales growth and the performance of Anthropic’s AI systems.
Anthropic has gained ground on OpenAI and Google this year, helped by its focus on business customers. Companies are using its models and tools for internal workflows as well as products that customers interact with. Ramp data showed that Anthropic’s share of U.S. business spending on AI grew last month.
The data also shows that companies are becoming more cautious about AI costs. Ramp analysts said businesses were “hitting their limit on AI spend” and shifting some workloads to cheaper systems.
According to Artificial Analysis, Anthropic’s leading model costs more than 2.5 times as much to use as OpenAI’s flagship model. Chinese open-weight models are cheaper. The cost difference matters more as companies move from small-scale testing to broader deployments, where inference expenses can quickly increase.
Some customers have already started changing how they use AI. Instead of relying on the most capable models for every task, they are moving certain workloads to cheaper alternatives. That doesn’t necessarily signal weaker demand for frontier AI, but it shows that companies are becoming more selective about where they need the best-performing models.
Anthropic submitted its filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. The filing put the company into a quiet period, restricting public comments about its financial results. Anthropic declined to comment on the planned offering.
The company raised just under $100 billion from venture capital firms, sovereign wealth funds and other institutional investors in 2026. Following a new investment in May, its valuation reached $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI for the first time.
Going public would bring new challenges that private investors have mostly tolerated so far. Anthropic has already come under pressure from the Trump administration and is still fighting a legal battle with the Defense Department, which called it a supply-chain risk earlier this year.
Anthropic also had to briefly take down its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models in June because of Commerce Department export controls. Two investors said the move hurt revenue growth that month and worried some customers who depended on those models.
The company bounced back after that period, the investors said. But the IPO will reveal whether public investors are comfortable giving a fast-growing AI company a multitrillion-dollar valuation while competition, regulation and pricing pressure continue to increase.
“It’s easy to come up with challenges,” said an Anthropic investor who has also backed AI groups including OpenAI and SpaceX, which went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation in June. “But the company continues to be in first position in performance, positioning and what people want exposure to.”
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