Anthropic eyes $2 trillion valuation in IPO that could top SpaceX as biggest ever

Anthropic is preparing for what could become the biggest IPO in history, with the Claude maker eyeing a valuation north of $2 trillion and an offering large enough to surpass SpaceX’s record-setting debut.

The five-year-old AI company expects its IPO to match or exceed the size of SpaceX’s offering, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Anthropic is running the numbers ahead of a potential public filing as soon as the end of August, though discussions remain fluid and the final size could change.

In June, TechStartups reported on Anthropic after the AI startup confidentially filed for IPO at nearly a $1 trillion valuation. “Today, Anthropic, PBC confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of our common stock. This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors,” the Claude maker said in a news release at the time.

“Anthropic PBC expects to match or beat the size of SpaceX’s record-setting initial public offering,” Bloomberg reported.

The numbers are staggering even by the standards of the AI investment boom.

SpaceX raised $75 billion in its initial share sale, according to Bloomberg data, making it the largest IPO on record. The total climbed to $86.2 billion after exercising an overallotment option. Anthropic would need extraordinary investor demand to clear that bar.

It may get it.

Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion valuation, putting it ahead of rival OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion after raising $122 billion in March. A $2 trillion public-market valuation would mean Anthropic more than doubling its May valuation in months.

The financial case behind that jump rests heavily on revenue growth. Anthropic generated preliminary second-quarter revenue of more than $11.5 billion, up from $787 million during the same period in 2025, according to Bloomberg. Its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion by the end of July.

Yet those numbers come with an equally striking counterweight: the cost of building frontier AI.

Anthropic posted a net loss of nearly $42 billion in 2025, roughly five times the $8.3 billion loss recorded a year earlier, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. The company reached positive adjusted operating income in the second quarter, offering investors an early sign that its economics could improve as revenue scales.

The AI boom is heading to public markets

An Anthropic IPO would give public investors something they have largely lacked during the generative AI boom: direct exposure to one of the companies building the models at its center.

It would arrive as enormous sums flow into compute infrastructure. Anthropic itself has agreed to a computing arrangement with SpaceX that could be worth tens of billions of dollars over the next three years. Training and serving increasingly capable models requires vast amounts of chips, data center capacity and electricity, making access to capital a strategic necessity rather than simply a balance-sheet advantage.

Anthropic is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on the offering, Bloomberg previously reported. More banks could join the group. The company is expected to finalize a revolving credit facility exceeding its roughly $10 billion target ahead of the public filing.

Control could become another closely watched part of the deal. Anthropic is considering super-voting shares that would give CEO Dario Amodei and his fellow co-founders greater influence after the company goes public. Amodei owns roughly 2% of Anthropic.

The timing could put Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which is reportedly considering a public listing in 2027. Both companies have filed confidentially for their respective IPOs.

For Wall Street, Anthropic would arrive during an already historic year. U.S. IPOs had raised $160.6 billion through August 19, closing in on the $195.2 billion record set in 2021, according to Bloomberg data.

A deal larger than SpaceX could push 2026 past that record almost on its own.

The bigger story may be what happens afterward. Private investors have spent years assigning extraordinary valuations to AI companies based on expectations of where the technology is headed. An Anthropic IPO would put one of the largest of those bets before public-market investors.

At $2 trillion, Wall Street would be asked to price not just Claude’s growth today, but how much of the future AI economy Anthropic can capture.

Anthropic Founders