Anthropic is getting ready for what could be one of the biggest stock market debuts in history somewhere in San Francisco, in the kind of office building that appears unremarkable from the outside but hums with the quiet intensity of people who believe they are working on something truly consequential. The business has not submitted an S-1. As of yet, there is no set exchange listing date, no confirmed offering price, and no public ticker. However, Wall Street is already discussing a valuation that is on par with some of the world’s most well-known businesses. Even by the standards of contemporary technology, there’s something almost vertigo-inducing about that.
The confirmed numbers are already remarkable. In February 2026, Anthropic closed a $30 billion Series G funding round at a $380 billion post-money valuation. The company revealed in April that its revenue run rate had risen from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $30 billion. Over 1,000 business clients now spend at least $1 million a year on Claude; in less than two months, this amount is said to have doubled. According to reports, Claude has clients in eight of the Fortune 10. These are neither aspirational goals nor projections. These are the operating figures that Anthropic has disclosed and is bringing up in an IPO discussion.
Then there is the more difficult-to-determine reported figure, which is estimated to be between $850 billion and $900 billion. It was discussed in private-market discussions this spring and reported by a number of media outlets after sources claimed investors had made preemptive offers for a new funding round. Anthropic refrained from making a public statement regarding those reports. That’s how things are done. A company that was valued at $380 billion in February is reportedly being discussed at more than twice that amount just a few months later, so it’s still worth considering the figure itself. The leap might be justified by the revenue acceleration. Additionally, it’s possible that the private market is outperforming itself in ways that will have a significant impact on later purchases by public investors.
This IPO’s compute dimension is the one that frequently receives insufficient coverage. Anthropic is not a lean software company with low capital requirements that operates on someone else’s infrastructure. It has promised to buy Microsoft Azure capacity worth $30 billion. It entered into contracts for Amazon Web Services capacity of up to five gigawatts. It declared intentions to employ Google’s TPUs on a scale valued at tens of billions of dollars. Additionally, it reached an agreement with SpaceX in early May to gain access to more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and more than 300 megawatts of data center capacity—basically all of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility—during the month. Claude is able to operate at the scale Anthropic requires because of that infrastructure investment. It is also, quite simply, the primary reason why cash flow and gross margin figures are so important and why confident valuation calls are premature in the absence of an S-1.
One gets the impression that Anthropic is in a truly unique position among IPO candidates when observing all of this from the outside. It has created a product called Claude, which businesses are taking very seriously and quickly. It stands out from OpenAI and the majority of its Silicon Valley competitors thanks to its safety-first Public Benefit Corporation structure, which could eventually aid in government relations and adoption by regulated industries. Among the banks reportedly in talks to spearhead the offering are Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. By all accounts, there is a genuine institutional appetite.
However, the caution is just as real. According to reports, Bank of America suggested that Anthropic and SpaceX going public at the same time could be a turning point for the current bull run. This isn’t because either company is weak; rather, it’s because mega-IPOs of this size typically absorb massive amounts of capital and reset expectations across the market. Without the audited financials, gross margin disclosures, governance details, or use-of-proceeds information that the SEC requires in a registration statement, retail investors chasing the Anthropic story before the S-1 arrives are effectively placing a wager on a headline valuation. IPO errors typically occur in the space between enthusiasm and knowledge.
For the time being, the honest response is that Anthropic might emerge as one of the decade’s most significant publicly traded companies, or it might launch at a valuation that leaves little room for the unexpected. Regarding the same company, both statements may be true simultaneously. When the S-1 is delivered, it will provide a more comprehensive response to that query than any existing technology.
