Anthropic Aims to Match or Beat SpaceX's Record IPO as Revenue Run Rate Passes $65 Billion

Anthropic is preparing one of the largest stock market debuts in history. According to a Bloomberg report published August 20, the maker of the Claude AI models expects its initial public offering to match — or even top — the size of SpaceX’s record-setting IPO. The statement, attributed to people familiar with the company’s thinking, signals that the frontier AI lab believes public-market demand for its equity is deep enough to absorb an offering of unprecedented scale.

A Record Run, By the Numbers

The confidence is grounded in a revenue trajectory that has stunned even seasoned AI watchers. Anthropic saw preliminary second-quarter revenue of more than $11.5 billion, according to Yahoo Finance’s summary of the Bloomberg report — a staggering jump from $787 million in the corresponding quarter of 2025. That is nearly a fifteenfold increase year over year.

On an annualized basis, the company’s run rate has now pushed above $65 billion, Axios reported on August 17, up from roughly $47 billion in mid-May and about $9 billion at the end of 2025. For context, it took Amazon more than two decades to reach that revenue scale; Anthropic has done it in roughly three years as a commercial entity.

The story behind the top line is even more aggressive. Reuters reported on August 15 that Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to two people familiar with the forecasts. That four-fold expansion from today’s run rate is the assumption underpinning a potential valuation near $2 trillion — a figure Jim Cramer and other market commentators have already begun debating on financial television.

From Confidential Filing to Blockbuster Listing

Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft IPO registration back in early June, beating rival OpenAI to the filing window. At the time, the company had just closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $960 billion post-money valuation, roughly doubling from $380 billion in February. Its annualized revenue crossed $47 billion in May, up from $30 billion earlier in the year.

Now, with the Bloomberg report indicating the company expects to match or exceed SpaceX’s haul, attention turns to what that actually means in dollar terms. Bloomberg’s own IPO tracker pegged SpaceX’s target at a valuation above $2 trillion with a target offer size of $75 billion — numbers that, if Anthropic merely approximates them, would make 2026 a year for the record books. Newly listed companies have already raised $160.6 billion through IPOs this year, and an Anthropic mega-listing would blow well past that cumulative figure on its own.

Why This Matters Beyond the Money

An IPO of this size would be more than a liquidity event — it would be the first true public-market pricing of a frontier AI lab with detailed financial disclosure. Until now, valuations for Anthropic and OpenAI have been set in private rounds among a small circle of strategic and institutional investors. A listing would force quarterly transparency: revenue concentration, compute costs, gross margins, and the economics of the API and enterprise businesses behind Claude would all become visible to anyone with a brokerage account.

The profit question looms largest. Reporting from mid-August notes that Anthropic has “barely turned a profit” despite its extraordinary top-line growth. AI labs are locked in a compute arms race — training and serving frontier models requires billions in GPU and data center spending — and public investors will get their first real look at how much of that $65 billion run rate survives as margin. Reuters’ reporting on the $190-200 billion 2028 forecast suggests the company is asking investors to underwrite a continuation of hypergrowth, not a steady-state business.

There is also a competitive dimension. OpenAI, Anthropic’s chief rival, has been building its own IPO narrative, and the two companies have traded revenue milestones all year. Whoever lists first — and at what multiple — sets the reference price for the entire AI sector. A blockbuster Anthropic debut could unlock a wave of AI infrastructure, chip, and application company listings behind it; a disappointing one could chill private valuations across the board.

The Skeptic’s View

Not everyone is convinced the numbers stack up. A $2 trillion valuation on $65 billion of run-rate revenue implies a price-to-sales multiple far above anything the public markets have historically sustained for software companies at scale — even allowing for AI’s growth premium. The 2028 forecast of $190-200 billion assumes enterprise AI spending continues compounding at rates never before seen in enterprise technology, through potential compute shortages, model commoditization from open-weight competitors, and macroeconomic cycles that a three-year-old commercial business has never weathered.

Critics also point out that run-rate figures can flatter. Q2 revenue annualized assumes the quarter’s growth persists for four quarters without churn, price compression, or competition eating into API volumes. SemiAnalysis and other analysts have documented how quickly inference prices have fallen industry-wide even as token volumes explode — a dynamic that could squeeze revenue even as usage soars.

What Comes Next

The timing of the offering remains fluid. Confidential filings typically precede a public S-1 by one to three months, and the company will need to finalize bankers, pick an exchange, and complete the roadshow. Market conditions will matter enormously: a $75 billion-plus offering requires deep demand from index funds, sovereign wealth funds, and the retail channel simultaneously.

Whenever it lands, the Anthropic IPO will be a defining moment for the AI industry’s maturation. It converts the most abstract question of the current cycle — “what is a frontier lab actually worth?” — into a number updated every trading day. And if Bloomberg’s reporting is right, that number’s debut will be the largest the market has ever seen.

Sources

• Bloomberg: Anthropic Expects to Match SpaceX’s Record IPO Size or Top It
• Reuters: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200 billion 2028 revenue forecast
• Axios: Anthropic’s revenue run rate surpasses $65 billion
• Yahoo Finance: Anthropic Expects to Match SpaceX’s Record IPO Size