Anthropic Wants a $2 Trillion IPO. Even Its Own Bankers Won't Say the Number Out Loud

Wall Street has spent the past month quietly pricing the biggest technology listing anyone has ever tried to pull off, and this week the timeline attached to it got a little less certain. Reuters reported on Friday that Anthropic, the AI lab behind the Claude models, is now expected to publish its IPO prospectus as late as the end of September and begin marketing shares to institutional investors no earlier than mid-October — a slower pace than bankers had been signaling only days earlier. If the schedule holds, trading could begin in late October or November. If it doesn't, this won't be the first time this particular calendar has moved.

A number nobody at the company will say out loud

The figure everyone keeps repeating is $2 trillion. Investors told the Financial Times they expect Anthropic to price its offering at that level or higher, which would make it the largest initial public offering on record, ahead of SpaceX's reported $1.77 trillion debut. Anthropic itself has never confirmed that number. The company declined to comment on the reported timetable, and people briefed on the process told Reuters that neither the valuation, the exact filing date, nor the final underwriting syndicate has been locked in. What is confirmed: Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, 2026, the formal first step that gives a company the option, not the obligation, to go public once regulators finish reviewing it.

Morgan Stanley has emerged as the leading candidate for lead underwriter, according to Bloomberg, with Goldman Sachs expected to serve as stabilization manager — the bank responsible for smoothing out the stock's price if it swings sharply in its first days of trading. JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Barclays are all said to be in line to join the underwriting group, largely on the strength of existing lending relationships with Anthropic. Separately, the company is finalizing what would be a $15 billion revolving credit facility, extra financial cushion timed to land right around the listing itself.

The growth curve that got Wall Street's attention

Strip away the speculation and the underlying business has genuinely moved fast. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate was around $9 billion at the end of 2025. By May 2026, when the company closed a $65 billion Series H funding round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, that figure had climbed to roughly $47 billion. Reuters has since reported it passed $65 billion by the end of July. Investors backing the IPO are now underwriting their valuation math on the assumption that annualized revenue reaches somewhere between $100 billion and $120 billion by the close of 2026, with some projections for 2028 running as high as $190 billion to $200 billion. Preliminary second-quarter figures, cited by Reuters, also pointed to Anthropic's first quarterly operating profit — on the order of $559 million — reversing what had been a steep operating loss just two years earlier.

Why the math is a bet on 2028, not 2026

Here is the part of the story that gets less attention than the headline number deserves. A $2 trillion valuation is difficult to justify against what Anthropic earns today, so bankers are instead applying forward revenue multiples to projections two or three years out — an unusual approach for a listing of this size. One investor put the logic bluntly to the Financial Times: if Anthropic's revenue keeps compounding at roughly 800% a year, even a conservative 30-times-revenue multiple would value the company north of $3 trillion. The comparison points to AI-adjacent companies like Palantir and cloud provider Nebius, which have traded at roughly 55 times revenue this year. Whether public-market investors, as opposed to venture investors chasing a single hot sector, will accept that same math once the stock is actually trading every day is the open question nobody can answer until it happens.

Timed moves, and a rival watching closely

Anthropic hasn't been standing still while the IPO math gets debated. On September 1, days before the Reuters report on the slower timetable, the company rolled out its Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 models alongside a new enterprise compliance program aimed at regulated industries and government-aligned customers. Read alongside the IPO preparations, the timing looks less like a coincidence and more like an attempt to lock down enterprise contracts before public shareholders start asking questions every quarter instead of every funding round. Bloomberg has also reported Anthropic is in talks to acquire Decart, a "world model" startup, for roughly $6 billion — a sign the company is still spending aggressively even mid-listing.

None of this is happening in isolation. OpenAI, Anthropic's closest rival, is working through its own IPO preparations and recently bought back $7 billion in employee stock as part of that process. Meanwhile, 2026 has otherwise been a thin year for large listings elsewhere: Kraken, Ledger, and Grayscale each shelved planned offerings in the crypto sector. An Anthropic debut at anywhere near $2 trillion would be an outlier in more ways than one — not just in size, but in timing, arriving in a market that has been unusually cautious about everything that isn't an AI company.

This account draws on reporting from Fortune, CTech, PYMNTS, and Bloomingbit.