Don't fly too close to the sun. Barely six months after overtaking OpenAI in valuation, Anthropic is now aiming for a dizzying goal. According to investors close to the matter, Claude's publisher is preparing an IPO worth more than $2,000 billion, scheduled for October. Enough to transform the company founded by the Amodei brothers into the largest IPO ever, ahead of SpaceX itself.
Anthropic targets $2 trillion for October IPO
Six investors close to Anthropic told the Financial Times, relayed by PYMNTS, that the company's meteoric revenue growth could justify a valuation more than twice its last known level. Anthropic reached $965 billion in May, after a funding round that had already put it ahead of OpenAI for the first time. However, managers have not set any quantified objectives, even internally: it is the investors themselves who build their own models based on the recent growth trajectory.
Anthropic remains subject to a reserve period since its confidential filing with the SEC in June, which officially limits its disclosures about its financial performance. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are already leading the operation.
The bet of growth at 800% per year
Investors' reasoning comes down to a handful of figures. Anthropic's annualized revenue exceeded $47 billion in May. Some backers of the company imagine it climbing between 100 and 120 billion dollars by the end of the year, more than ten times its level at the start of the year. An investor cited by the Financial Times goes further: a company that grows 800% per year could, according to him, trade for at least 30 times its revenues, which would push Anthropic's valuation up to $3,000 billion. Palantir and Nebius, the two closest comparables on the listed market, already trade at around 55 times their revenues.
Nearly $100 billion has been invested in Anthropic since the start of the year, between venture capital funds, sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors. A mass of capital which has no equivalent other than the windfall swallowed up in data centers to run these models.
Washington and China, the two shadows hanging over the IPO
The bet is not a given. In June, a temporary embargo from the US Department of Commerce on Anthropic's flagship models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, forced the company to briefly withdraw them, an episode which worried customers and slowed growth for several weeks, reports Option Finance. China adds additional pressure, with significantly cheaper models that are visibly improving in performance.
The price is also a problem. Anthropic's flagship model costs more than two and a half times the price of the equivalent product from OpenAI, at a time when corporate clients are looking to reduce their AI spending, even if it means migrating to less powerful but much less expensive models. Betting $2 trillion on a company still caught up in these headwinds is like betting that growth will continue to crush everything else, including price.
