Anthropic Is Gunning for SpaceX's Record: An IPO That Could Raise $86 Billion or More

The number everyone in AI finance is whispering this week is $86.2 billion. That is what SpaceX’s June 2026 initial public offering ultimately raised — after pricing 555.6 million shares at $135, an offering that began at $75 billion in initial size and swelled into the largest IPO in history. And according to Bloomberg reporting published Thursday, August 21, Anthropic PBC expects to match that record or beat it when it finally prices its own listing, people familiar with the matter say.

If “matching or beating” sounds like corporate modesty, do the arithmetic: matching the final figure means raising on the order of $86 billion, and market chatter — including the Kobeissi Letter’s widely shared note — already floats a raise approaching $100 billion. Either number would make Anthropic’s debut the largest IPO ever attempted by a pure software company, and by a wide margin.

How we got here

The road to this moment has been unusually fast, even by AI-sector standards:

• June 1, 2026 — Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, simultaneously disclosing that its revenue run-rate had surpassed $47 billion annualized, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025.
• June 8, 2026 — One week later, OpenAI filed its own paperwork for a proposed $75 billion offering at a $1.75 trillion valuation, having raised $65 billion privately at a $965 billion valuation.
• June 11, 2026 — SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share, raising $75 billion initially; greenshoe exercises and demand pushed the final total to $86.2 billion.
• August 15, 2026 — Reuters reported that Anthropic is internally projecting $190–200 billion in revenue for 2028, a forecast that now anchors how investors are sizing the offering.
• August 19–21, 2026 — Bloomberg reported that Anthropic’s annualized revenue has topped $65 billion, and that the company expects to match or exceed SpaceX’s record raise. Anthropic could publicly file IPO paperwork as soon as this month, with pricing widely expected between late October and early December 2026.

The numbers that justify a record

Three figures explain why Anthropic — a company that was a research lab with a safety mission in 2021 — believes it can command the largest IPO in history:

1. Hypergrowth revenue. The run-rate went from $9 billion at end-2025 to $47 billion in June to over $65 billion annualized by mid-August. Earlier this year, reporting described a quarter in which annualized revenue grew roughly 80-fold year-over-year to a reported $44 billion figure. Whatever the exact multiple, it is the fastest revenue ramp of any enterprise software company on record.

2. A staggering 2028 forecast. The Reuters exclusive — $190–200 billion of 2028 revenue — implies Anthropic believes its current run-rate will roughly triple again in two years. That forecast is doing enormous work in the valuation math. At the private mark of $965 billion, investors were already paying roughly 20x forward-looking revenue; the public filing will test whether public-market buyers accept that multiple, discount it, or bid it higher.

3. Enterprise entrenchment. Anthropic’s Claude models have become the default choice in coding and agentic workflows, and the company committed as much as $200 billion to Google Cloud for compute — a signal of both its infrastructure appetite and its confidence in demand. TechCrunch reported on August 20 that OpenAI is gaining ground among US business users, but Anthropic still held roughly 41% of that market as of the latest data, a position that makes its revenue unusually durable for its age.

Why the size matters more than the valuation

A record IPO is not just a trophy. Size is strategy, for three reasons:

• Index inclusion gravity. An offering large enough to rival SpaceX’s means enough float for Anthropic to enter major indices quickly — pulling passive inflows that stabilize the stock after the debut.
• Compute capitalization. Anthropic’s binding constraint is compute. Raising $86–100 billion in a single offering is, functionally, pre-funding several years of data-center commitments while capital markets remain open to AI infrastructure bets.
• The sequencing war. Anthropic filed before OpenAI and appears on track to price first. In a year where SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all racing to public markets, being the first AI lab to price — and pricing big — sets the reference point every subsequent AI listing will be measured against.

The bear case, honestly

A record-size offering also concentrates risk. If the 2028 forecast of $190–200 billion proves optimistic — and enterprise AI budgets are famously cyclical — the same float that enables index inclusion enables a historic unwind. Anthropic also raised its own catastrophic-misalignment risk rating this month and disclosed work on an unreleased “Model 2,” a reminder that the company itself sees frontier-scale risk trending upward even as it courts public investors. And OpenAI’s $1.75 trillion filing looms: if it prices first and poorly, the window for a record Anthropic debut could close as quickly as it opened.

What to watch

The next concrete milestones are a public S-1 filing (possible within weeks), a roadshow valuation range, and a pricing date in the late-October-to-early-December window most analysts expect. Watch three numbers when the public filing drops: the revenue disclosure and its growth rate, the compute-commitment liabilities, and the free-float percentage. Those three will determine whether “match or beat SpaceX” was bravado — or conservative guidance for the largest IPO in history.