Anthropic's IPO valuation uses a 2028 revenue forecast of $190-200 billion, with bankers applying multiples seen at Palantir and Cloudflare, sources said.
Anthropic's IPO valuation is being built on a revenue forecast two years out, with bankers and investors applying enterprise value-to-revenue multiples to a projected 2028 revenue of $190 billion to $200 billion, according to two people familiar with the company's financials.
The figure has not been previously reported. It dwarfs the $47 billion revenue run rate the company publicized as recently as May. That run rate itself had surged from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, reflecting the speed at which Anthropic's business is expanding.
Using revenue multiples is common for high-growth software companies that have yet to establish a mature profit profile. Looking two years ahead is less typical, the people said. The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing an AI company whose margins are still being pressured by enormous spending on computing power, model training and hiring.
Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million. The company has said its revenue run rate grew more than 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026.
That growth is a key reason investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple. The valuation rests on the expectation that Anthropic's current spending is funding a business that will eventually generate much higher revenue and margins. Training and inference could become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could become a smaller share of revenue as the company scales, the people said.
There have been precedents among some of the fastest-growing companies that hit the market recently. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations in the runup to that firm's IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June, the people said.
Cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir and Elon Musk's SpaceX are among the public companies being considered as reference points for Anthropic's valuation ahead of the company's analyst day, the people said. Public-market comparables are a crucial part of the IPO valuation process, giving investors a benchmark for how companies seen as having similar growth profiles and business models are valued.
Palantir is valued at 53 times this year's expected revenue, making it one of Wall Street's priciest stocks. SpaceX and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, LSEG data show.
Each of the companies offers a different lens on Anthropic. Palantir has become a reference point for investors valuing businesses with rapid growth and exposure to AI. Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company. SpaceX offers an example of a company valued in part on expectations for its future scale rather than its current financial profile.
Established companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings, or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the economics of the business. For Anthropic, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale, the people said. Anthropic is spending enormous amounts on GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. Those expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but could become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows.
"Could they get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time," said David Merkel, a principal at investment firm Aleph Investments. "Does it really produce so much additional productivity? These are just questions that we have to ask if we were thinking of pricing this, buying this."
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Drafted by a large language model from the source reporting linked above, then screened by automated publishing checks. It is not read by a journalist before publication. Some articles cite our Alpha Score. Verify prices and figures against the original source. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.