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Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, is preparing for what could become one of the largest stock market debuts ever.

Investors are betting the AI startup will go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, a number that would push past SpaceX's record and make Anthropic's debut the largest IPO in history.

According to the company's backers, Anthropic's rapidly rising revenue would justify more than doubling its current valuation once it floats this fall. A listing at that level would hand billions of dollars in gains to early investors in the five-year-old company, but it would also test public markets that have grown wary of sky-high AI valuations.

Anthropic's backers point to booming demand for its Claude models as the reason their expectations aren't out of line. Investors expect the company's annualized revenue to land between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026, more than ten times where it started the year.

One investor told the FT that even a conservative multiple of 30 times revenue, low for a company growing roughly 800 percent a year, would already value Anthropic close to $3 trillion.

There's no U.S. public company that maps directly onto Anthropic, so investors are borrowing comparisons where they can. Data analytics firm Palantir and cloud company Nebius, both treated as AI beneficiaries, have traded this year at roughly 55 times revenue. Anthropic executives haven't settled on a valuation target for the IPO yet, even in private, according to several investors, so backers are building their own models instead.

The bullish math comes despite a list of real problems. Competition from Chinese AI labs is intensifying, regulators are circling, and Anthropic remains locked in a dispute with the U.S. government. The Commerce Department briefly banned Anthropic's top models in June, and the episode contributed to a slowdown in revenue growth that month. The company has since bounced back and is growing at a pace that's extraordinary even by Silicon Valley standards.

Anthropic, led by Dario Amodei, filed confidential paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, which puts the company in a quiet period limiting what it can say publicly about its finances. The startup has pulled ahead of rivals OpenAI and Google this year on the strength of models that outperform the competition, and it has leaned hard into selling to business customers.

Anthropic said in May that its annualized revenue had passed $47 billion. Venture firms, sovereign wealth funds and other big investors poured close to $100 billion into the company over the course of 2026, and its valuation overtook OpenAI's for the first time in May.

The company still faces plenty of uncertainty. It's in active litigation against the Department of Defense, which labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk earlier this year, and it briefly had to pull models like Fable 5 after export controls hit in June. That episode rattled some customers. Cost is becoming a bigger issue too.

Cloud cost analytics firm Vantage found that on standard published rates, OpenAI's comparable models typically undercut Claude on input pricing, with workhorse tier models running around $1.75 per million tokens on OpenAI's side against $3 on Anthropic's, though the gap narrows once caching and long context work are factored in.

Chinese open-weight alternatives have also gotten dramatically better this year at a fraction of the price. Anthropic still grew its share of U.S. business customers last month, per data from payments company Ramp, but Ramp's own analysts found businesses are increasingly hitting the ceiling on what they're willing to spend on AI and shifting to cheaper tools.

Even so, none of that seems to be denting investor appetite much. Backers who have also put money into OpenAI and SpaceX say Anthropic remains the name in the sector that public market money most wants exposure to, challenges and all.

The Bar Anthropic Is Trying to Clear

That SpaceX comparison isn't superficial. In June, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company priced its IPO at $135 a share, valuing it at $1.77 trillion and raising $75 billion, the largest public offering ever recorded and more than double Saudi Aramco's previous record from 2019. Musk skipped the usual price discovery process entirely and simply named a fixed price.

Shares climbed further once trading opened, briefly pushing SpaceX's value above $2 trillion, before drifting back down toward its IPO price in the weeks since as investors reassessed how much of that valuation was really about Musk versus the business underneath it.

That's the pattern Anthropic is now being measured against, and it doubles as the warning built into every bullish investor model out there. SpaceX proved public markets would pay up for a category-defining company at a scale nobody thought possible. It also proved those same markets will mark a stock right back down once the hype meets a real earnings report.

Anthropic Isn't the Only One Racing to List

OpenAI filed its own confidential paperwork with the SEC a week after Anthropic and had been eyeing a public debut as soon as this fall at a valuation above $1 trillion. More recently, Sam Altman's team has reportedly leaned toward pushing the listing into 2027 rather than accept anything below that trillion-dollar mark, a decision tied partly to a bridge loan SoftBank is on the hook to repay.

Behind those two, the pipeline is getting crowded. Data platform Databricks, last valued around $134 billion, has been IPO ready for years but has repeatedly found reasons to wait, and its CEO called 2026 "a terrible year to go public" simply because of how much attention SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are soaking up. Payments giant Stripe, valued in the $106 billion to $159 billion range on secondary markets, remains the market's longest running will they won't they, with no filing yet in sight.

Anthropic is racing to be the second of the group across the finish line, betting that investors will treat a $2 trillion price tag the same way they treated SpaceX's, as a bet worth making rather than a bubble waiting to pop.