Anthropic surges to a $1.2 trillion valuation — up 550% in a year

July 12, 2026, secondary markets valued Anthropic at $1.2 trillion, according to Business Insider data. This represents a 550% increase over one year — a record jump for a company that has also become one of the most expensive and least accessible private companies in the world for investors.

Why Anthropic shares are inaccessible

Anthropic has strictly limited access to its shares from the start — a strategic decision by its founders. Large share packages were distributed among founders Dario and Daniela Amodei, leading venture capital funds (Sequoia Capital, Google, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund), and select company employees. Only a small fraction of the total volume trades on open secondary markets — remnants from rare negotiations between institutional investors who are reluctant to part with such a rare and promising security.

Secondary market economics work simply. Each rare deal becomes an event and a signal to the rest of the market. If two major funds agreed to buy a small package at a price implying a $1.2 trillion valuation, other participants extrapolate that price across the entire company. Result: extreme price volatility with minimal trading volume — this is the classic hallmark of a speculative bubble, where price loses connection to actual liquidity.

What drives investor demand

Behind demand for Anthropic shares lie real achievements in the company's AI development. In 2026, Anthropic released a series of competitive Claude models, including the performant Claude Opus 4.6, attracted strategic investments worth tens of billions of dollars from Google and Saudi Arabia, and deployed its commercial service across hundreds of corporate projects worldwide.

Investors see the company's potential. Key factors supporting demand for its shares:

• Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Sonnet, and other versions are used by developers and corporate clients in production environments
• Google invested tens of billions of dollars in Anthropic as part of a deep strategic partnership
• Corporate clients increasingly choose Anthropic as a serious competitive alternative to OpenAI in the rapidly growing market
• Rare supply of shares on secondary markets artificially creates buzz and speculative demand

Demand is real, but supply is cryptically limited.

What this means for AI investments

The $1.2 trillion valuation simultaneously reflects two opposing yet equally true processes. First: Anthropic truly is a powerful and ambitious AI laboratory competing at the level of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, and other recognized industry leaders, and its business demonstrates rapid growth. Second: the secondary market systematically overvalues the company due to a critical deficit of shares in free circulation.

This distance between conditional fair value (which the market will set at IPO) and current speculative valuation will inevitably narrow in coming years. This will happen either through a primary stock offering (IPO) and entry into the public capital market if Anthropic decides to raise additional capital this way, or through gradual expansion of share access to a broader circle of investors. For now, secondary market prices are pure speculation on scarcity and lack of information, not an honest reflection of the company's real value.