Anthropic IPO priced on $190-200bn revenue target set two years out
Wall Street is valuing the AI group on a 2028 sales forecast more than four times its current run rate, stretching valuation norms and testing investor appetite for forward-looking risk.
Anthropic's forthcoming IPO, set to rank among the largest on record, is being priced on a 2028 revenue projection of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to two people familiar with the company's financials. The figure, not previously reported, dwarfs the $47 billion annualised run rate Anthropic disclosed as recently as May and places the burden of proof squarely on investors willing to underwrite growth two years into the future.
Bankers and investors are applying enterprise-value-to-revenue multiples against those forward forecasts rather than current earnings, four sources said. The practice is common for high-growth software firms without mature profit profiles, but anchoring a valuation two years ahead is unusual and reflects both the velocity of Anthropic's expansion and the absence of meaningful present-day earnings to work with.
Searching for comparables
Ahead of Anthropic's analyst day, Cloudflare, Palantir and SpaceX are being discussed as public-market reference points, the sources said. Palantir trades at 53 times this year's expected revenue, while SpaceX and Cloudflare each sit at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, LSEG data show. Each peer captures a different facet of the Anthropic story: AI exposure, infrastructure-led growth, and valuation driven by future scale rather than current cash generation.
Precedents for such forward-looking pricing exist. Cerebras Systems backers cited 2028 revenue expectations ahead of that company's IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended to 2029 before its record-valuation listing in June.
Why current earnings fall short
Anthropic is spending heavily on GPUs, computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. Those costs depress EBITDA today but are expected to shrink as a share of revenue once the business reaches scale. The company's trajectory supports the logic: revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $47 billion by May, and Anthropic has projected second-quarter 2026 revenue of at least $10.9 billion, more than doubling the prior quarter. The company is on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
Anthropic has said its run rate grew more than tenfold annually in each of the three years through early 2026. That trajectory is the core reason investors accept a 2028 multiple.
The risk premium question
The approach carries obvious risk. Heavy AI infrastructure spending has already triggered pullbacks in several popular tech stocks in recent months, including names investors view as comparable to Anthropic. If revenue growth slows or computing costs fail to decline as projected, the valuation math unravels quickly.
"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 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.
