The benchmark Anthropic is now measuring itself against is not OpenAI. It is SpaceX.
Bloomberg reported Friday that Anthropic PBC expects its initial public offering to match or beat the size of SpaceX's record-setting debut, citing people familiar with the matter. That is a specific and unusually aggressive bar. SpaceX raised $75 billion in its initial share sale, according to Bloomberg data, a total that climbed to $86.2 billion once underwriters exercised their overallotment option. No company has ever raised more. Anthropic, five years old and still burning cash at extraordinary scale, is running the numbers on clearing it.
The mechanics are moving quickly. Anthropic could publicly file its registration statement as soon as the end of August, according to the Bloomberg report, following the confidential Form S-1 it submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1. Discussions remain fluid and the final deal size could change. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are leading the offering, with additional banks expected to join, and the company is working to finalize a revolving credit facility above its roughly $10 billion target before the public filing lands.
Hovering over all of it is a number the company has not confirmed: roughly $2 trillion. The Financial Times reported earlier this month that Anthropic shareholders expect the listing to price the company above that mark, potentially in October, though the valuation has not been formally fixed internally and remains an investor expectation rather than a company target. For context, Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion post-money valuation. A $2 trillion debut would mean more than doubling that figure in roughly five months.
The Numbers Behind the Ask
The revenue trajectory is the argument. Anthropic generated preliminary second-quarter revenue of more than $11.5 billion, up from $787 million in the same period of 2025, according to Bloomberg — a more than fourteenfold increase. Its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion by the end of July, and investors told the Financial Times they expect that figure to land between $100 billion and $120 billion by December. Those forward projections are investor estimates, not guidance, and they are the load-bearing assumption in every bull case circulating on Wall Street right now.
The counterweight is equally large. Anthropic posted a net loss of nearly $42 billion in 2025, roughly five times the $8.3 billion loss recorded the prior year, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. Frontier model training and inference consume chips, data center capacity and electricity at a scale that turns access to capital into a strategic weapon rather than a balance-sheet nicety. Anthropic has itself agreed to a computing arrangement with SpaceX that could be worth tens of billions of dollars over three years. One encouraging signal for underwriters: the company reached positive adjusted operating income in the second quarter, an early indication that unit economics improve as revenue scales.
Governance is the third variable. Anthropic is considering super-voting shares that would give CEO Dario Amodei and his co-founders outsized influence after the listing. Amodei owns roughly 2% of the company.
Why It Matters
An IPO of this size would do something the generative AI boom has so far avoided: submit the central thesis to a daily price discovery mechanism. Private rounds are negotiated among a small number of participants who share a worldview and a lock-up. Public markets are adversarial. They produce short sellers, quarterly earnings calls and analysts who model inference gross margin line by line.
That scrutiny arrives at an awkward moment for the industry's rhetoric. Amodei himself conceded the gap in a post on X last weekend. "The most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world," he wrote. He was blunter about the industry's favorite talking point: "At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer." Amodei said Anthropic hopes for "incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months" — a timeline that puts the listing comfortably ahead of the evidence.
Skeptics frame the risk as durability rather than growth. "Whenever there is speculation, there's also usually substance and fundamentals," Patrick Corrigan, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told BeInCrypto. "The question here is whether the price investors are going to end up paying is going to match up to the substance and fundamentals of what AI is really going to do in the real economy and as a business."
There is a market-structure dimension too. U.S. IPOs had raised $160.6 billion through August 19, closing on the $195.2 billion record set in 2021, according to Bloomberg data. A deal larger than SpaceX's would push 2026 past that record essentially by itself. Pricing at $2 trillion also resets the reference point for every private AI valuation behind it, including OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion after its $122 billion March raise and is reportedly weighing a 2027 listing of its own.
What to Watch
The public S-1 is the event that matters. It will convert years of leaked run-rate figures into audited financials, and it will show the things private rounds never had to disclose: customer concentration, compute commitments and their durations, gross margin by product line, the real shape of that $42 billion loss, and the exact voting structure Amodei's shares would carry. Watch whether the filing lands before September, whether the disclosed price range approaches the $2 trillion figure investors have floated or lands materially below it, and whether the revolver closes above $10 billion. Watch, too, how OpenAI responds if Anthropic prices successfully in October. At $2 trillion, Wall Street is not being asked to price Claude's current business. It is being asked to price how much of the future AI economy one company can capture.
“The most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.”— Dario Amodei, Co-founder and CEO, Anthropic