Anthropic IPO to pitch $30tn AI market to investors

If you thought the SpaceX IPO threw out some unbelievably big numbers, Anthropic could be about to go even larger.

Anthropic is set to pitch to investors in its upcoming initial public offering a total addressable market (TAM) exceeding $30 trillion. That would place it ahead of the $28.5 ‌trillion touted by SpaceX, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. SpaceX dubbed this "the largest actionable" market in "human history”, but it seems Anthropic sees more.

Figures get thrown around a lot but roughly Anthropic is looking at raising up to $100bn to give it a $2tn valuation, beating SpaceX’s $1.77tn debut . SpaceX originally targeted $75 billion but ultimately raised $86.2 billion after bankers exercised the greenshoe overallotment option.

Anthropic is expected to publish prospectus documents shortly, potentially opening the door to a stock market debut in September or October.

The Claude developer more than doubled revenue to $11.6 billion in the second quarter, up 14x from the same quarter a year ago. What’s remarkable is that it became the first genuine frontier AI lab to report profitable quarter, showing investors that it can outrun its compute bill. 

But its IPO valuation hinges on an expected $190 billion to $200 billion run rate by 2028. Its annualised revenue run rate hit $65 billion in late July, up from $9bn at the end of 2025. This annualised run rate could be in the region of $100bn by the end of the year.

And pushing as large a TAM as possible helps justify these numbers. The larger the TAM the stronger the case for heavy spend and the stronger the anchor for its growth story ahead of the IPO.

Benchmarking a valuation for Anthropic is tricky. There is no comparable US peer. SpaceX doesn’t just do AI – it launches and relaunches rockets and satellites, albeit the vast majority of SpaceX’s TAM is derived from AI. 

Anthropic confidentially submitted its draft filing to go public to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier this year. “This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review,” Anthropic said on 1 June. “The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.”

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI insiders. Whilst it initially it appeared to fall behind the ChatGPT maker, recent advances have seen it catch up and in some ways overtake. A push into coding has been pivotal as enterprise demand rather than consumer subscriptions drives growth. Claude Code, the assistant for software developers, has become one of its most popular products and highest revenue generators.

Although the company posted positive adjusted operating income in Q2, investors will be mindful about steep losses in the past and the path of compute costs vs revenue growth. In 2025 the company posted a net loss of $42bn as compute costs soared. As hyperscalers spend more than $725bn on the AI buildout, Anthropic seems to be a bit more modest, committing $50bn to data centre spending in the US this year. Anthropic’s more conservative approach to spending – committing to 10 gigawatts of compute vs OpenAI’s 30 gigawatts, means it’s achieved a faster path to profitability.

But it still hinges on growth, not cost control. CEO Dario Amodei has acknowledged that missing growth estimates for just a year could threaten the firm’s survival. Even a slip from 10x revenue growth to 5x could be catastrophic.

Political headwinds are a consideration with Anthropic clashing with the White House. The Trump administration terminated Anthropic contracts in March and called the company a supply chain risk after it refused to give the Pentagon unrestricted access to its AI models. The White House has also been irked by Amodei’s repeated warnings about the dangers of AI and calls to regulate the technology. Anthropic had to briefly pause its top models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after the US commerce department slapped it with export controls in June. Pressure is coming from China, too, with the dissemination of cheaper AI models.

Although we can cite plenty of challenges, Anthropic is extending its lead in business AI adoption. According to Ramp, Anthropic rose to 43.5% of eligible businesses in July, widening its lead over OpenAI, which rose to 39.7%. However, we can quickly find problems here too. The analysts at Ramp warned that their latest data shows “businesses are hitting their limit on AI spend”. They note that adoption is slowing and therefore more of their growth will have to come from existing businesses already spending on AI, “particularly the advanced spenders, and those businesses are increasingly spending on open source”.