Anthropic Prepares the Largest IPO in History: About $100B Raised at a Valuation of $2T or More

Anthropic could raise about $100B in a public listing that may take place as early as October, which would top SpaceX's record offering. Investors are modeling a valuation of $2T or more for the company, The Next Web reports, citing the Financial Times.

Unprecedented Numbers

The scale of the proposed offering is easiest to grasp through the comparisons The Next Web cites: $100B is ten times the largest European listing of recent decades. For an IPO market that has lived on modest offerings in recent years, Anthropic's debut would be an event of a different order, comparable not to past tech listings but to sovereign offerings.

• Amount raised: about $100B, potentially as early as October
• Modeled valuation: $2T or more
• Benchmark for comparison: SpaceX's record, which Anthropic intends to surpass

The Financial Times adds a curious detail: Anthropic's top management has not set a target valuation, even in private discussions. The final terms will depend on demand from institutional investors. That is a deliberate stance: given the market's current appetite for AI assets, any figure named in advance risks turning out too low.

Why Now

There is a pragmatic logic to going public in 2026. Training frontier models is getting exponentially more expensive: compute contracts are measured in tens of billions of dollars, and private rounds, even gigantic ones, no longer cover the planning horizon. The public market remains the only source of capital at the required scale.

Anthropic is also coming to the listing from a strong operating position. Claude has become the de facto standard in enterprise software development, and the company's enterprise business is growing faster than its competitors'. The window in which a company can sell investors both growth and leadership will not stay open forever.

What This Means

An IPO of this size will be a stress test for the entire AI economy. A successful offering would legitimize trillion-dollar valuations for private AI labs and almost certainly accelerate IPOs by competitors. Weak demand, by contrast, would be the first loud signal that the public market is not ready to pay private-investor prices for the AI race. October's stakes will go beyond a single company's balance sheet.

FAQ

When could the listing take place?

According to the FT, as early as October 2026, but the timing may slip: the company has not announced formal terms for the offering.

Where does the $2T valuation come from?

It is the level potential investors are building into their models, not an official figure: according to the FT, Anthropic's leadership has not fixed a target valuation, even internally.