Anthropic investors have been kicking the tires on what could be the most valuable initial public offering in history. A handful of the frontier lab's backers confirmed to the Financial Times this week that they expect privately held Anthropic to go public in October with a targeted valuation of $2 trillion or higher, which easily eclipses SpaceX's record-breaking $1.77 trillion IPO in June. That valuation would more than double the $965 billion the company was worth when it reported a Series H funding round in May.
Bloomberg, meanwhile, has reported that Anthropic is also in talks to buy the startup Decart AI for $6 billion. Anthropic filed for an IPO confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but has not publicly set a timeline. Rival frontier lab OpenAI followed suit shortly after Anthropic, but is not expected to IPO until 2027.
The awkward part of all this, though, is that Anthropic isn't making money yet. Across the Nasdaq 100 universe, the index of large-cap tech companies Anthropic would join post-IPO, the average company trades at roughly 34 times trailing earnings and 25 times forward earnings. At those multiples, a $2 trillion Anthropic would need to post annual profits in the neighborhood of $59 billion to $79 billion to keep pace.
It could be getting closer, but the Claude chatbot purveyor led by Dario Amodei still has a long way to go. The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic's second-quarter 2026 revenue would more than double to $10.9 billion, while the company would for the first time post an operating profit. But operating profit is not the same as net income.
Operating profit tells investors whether the business is covering costs like salaries, compute, and research, but it doesn't account for interest on debt or taxes. Net income is what's leftover after all of that is subtracted out. And for a company like Anthropic, with all the needs that go along with sustaining a bleeding-edge frontier lab, the distance between operating profit and actual bottom-line profit could be substantial.
Avery Marquez, director of investment strategies at Renaissance Capital, said approaching that threshold of a profitable bottom line will be key to make Anthropic's valuation palatable to public investors. "Just seeing the [$2 trillion] number, it's definitely jolting," she said. "Reaching near operating profitability will at least be something that in my mind makes this very large valuation maybe not seem so crazy." At $2 trillion, Anthropic would be keeping company with six other businesses in the world with valuations that size or more plus Broadcom, which has been floating near the $2 trillion mark since first crossing it earlier this year.
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