Anthropic is preparing for what could become one of the largest initial public offerings in history, but the potential $2 trillion valuation comes with an extraordinary assumption: investors are being asked to price the AI company largely on revenue it expects to generate two years from now.

The Claude maker is projecting roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue for 2028, according to people familiar with its financials.

That would represent a massive expansion from the roughly $47 billion annual revenue run rate Anthropic reported as recently as May.

The numbers explain how Wall Street could arrive at a valuation approaching or even exceeding $2 trillion — territory occupied by only a handful of the world’s most valuable companies.

Rather than relying primarily on today’s earnings, bankers and investors are examining what Anthropic could be worth if its rapid growth continues and applying revenue multiples to those future sales.

That is an unusually aggressive way to value a company of this size, but Anthropic’s growth has been unusually aggressive as well.

Its revenue run rate stood at about $9 billion at the end of 2025 before climbing above $47 billion by May. Anthropic has said its revenue run rate increased more than tenfold annually in each of the three years through early 2026.

The company has also projected at least $10.9 billion of revenue for the second quarter of 2026 and its first quarterly operating profit, at approximately $559 million.

The enormous valuation therefore rests on more than whether businesses continue buying Claude.

Anthropic currently spends heavily on GPUs, data centers, model training, inference and employees. Investors betting on a multitrillion-dollar valuation are effectively betting that those expenses will consume a smaller percentage of revenue as Anthropic becomes larger and AI technology becomes more efficient.

Bankers are looking at companies including Palantir, Cloudflare and SpaceX for clues about how aggressively investors may value a rapidly growing technology company whose future scale is considerably larger than its current financial results.

That creates both the opportunity and the risk.

If Anthropic comes close to generating $200 billion annually by 2028 while improving its margins, today’s seemingly extraordinary valuation could eventually be supported by an enormous operating business.

If growth slows, however, investors buying into an IPO at a valuation approaching $2 trillion would have paid today for hundreds of billions of dollars in sales that have yet to materialize.

That may ultimately be the defining question surrounding Anthropic’s IPO.

Investors would not simply be buying one of the world’s fastest-growing AI companies. They would be making one of the largest bets yet that the AI boom can deliver the extraordinary revenue now being projected for it.

JBizNews Desk | San Francisco

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