The artificial-intelligence boom is about to face one of its largest tests of valuations.
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, is projecting roughly$190 billion to $200 billion in revenue for 2028, according to Reuters, citing people privy to the matter.
That estimate is increasingly becoming a pillar of Wall Street’s effort to value Anthropic ahead of what might be one of the largest initial public offerings on record.
And the figures are staggering.
Anthropic said in May it had a revenue run rate of more than $47 billion, Reuters reported. It would require more than quadrupling that annualized pace in around two years to reach $200 billion.
One investor told Reuters that a valuation as high as $2 trillion was conceivable.
“Could they get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could, and I just wonder if it would stay there over time,” David Merkel, principal at Aleph Investments, told Reuters.
That last element may be the question investors should be asking.
Anthropic isn’t simply asking Wall Street to value the business it has today. Its prospective IPO valuation depends on investors buying into the much bigger firm that management hopes it will become.
Anthropic’s revenue growth is the reason investors are looking so far ahead
Anthropic’s figures have been shifting so quickly that traditional valuation methodologies are less useful
The corporation reported in February that its sales run rate hit $14 billion and that Claude Code alone had a run rate of nearly $2.5 billion. Business subscribers to Claude Code had quadrupled since the start of the year, with enterprise usage making up more than half of that product’s income.
Anthropic stated its revenue run rate had surpassed $30 billion by April, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2023.
By May, the figure had crossed $47 billion.
That’s why lenders are looking at 2028 revenue and not just pricing the company on earnings now.
Anthropic is still pouring money into GPUs, model training, inference, and talent, which is hurting present profitability. The bull case is that those costs will become a smaller fraction of revenue as the company grows.
Related: Morgan Stanley leads $15B bet on Anthropic’s Texas campus
That growth is also visible outside of enterprise contracts.
TechCrunch reported that Claude’s paying-consumer revenue had risen about 75% since January 2026 among the users it analyzed, suggesting the company’s traction is broadening beyond API and enterprise buyers.
That diversification is important because it’s easier to defend a $2 trillion valuation if Anthropic can develop multiple revenue engines, rather than depend on a limited set of cloud customers.
The $2 trillion question is really a valuation-multiple question
Anthropic does not have a clear public market twin.
That is why bankers are reportedly looking at Palantir Technologies (PLTR), Cloudflare (NET) and SpaceX (SPCX) as reference points.
Those comparisons are flawed, but they do help to explain how Wall Street could arrive at a figure as large as $2 trillion.
Palantir trades at around 53 times its expected 2026 revenue, while Cloudflare and SpaceX each trade at roughly 41.6 times their expected 2026 revenue.
It wouldn’t need anything close to those multiples on its estimated 2028 revenue to justify a $2 trillion valuation for Anthropic.
At $200 billion in revenue, a 10-times sales multiple would already equal $2 trillion.
That’s certainly an ambitious value, but it’s a lot less severe than the multiples investors are already willing to pay for other high-growth AI businesses.
MarketWatch notes there’s an expectation that Anthropic might one day debut with a valuation of $2 trillion to $3 trillion, topping SpaceX’s record-breaking public-market debut.
The upside case thus relies on two assumptions: that revenues get close to Anthropic’s estimates and that investors continue to offer a premium multiple to companies they view as essential to AI.
Private markets are already testing that thesis
Anthropic’s valuation is already under heavy pressure ahead of an IPO.
In February, a fundraising deal valued the corporation at $380 billion.
Just a few months later, the May Series H fundraising valued it at $965 billion.
That represents a rise of more than 150% in a few months.
Then followed stories of secondary market trades that suggested valuations around $1.5 trillion; however, shares were difficult to get since few holders wanted to sell.
Those data imply investor enthusiasm is not an abstraction.
The private market is already nudging Anthropic toward the kind of valuation that public investors may soon be forced to accept.
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There’s also an enterprise use case to fuel the hype.
Anthropic’s Claude Code has gradually become a key offering for developers. A recent Microsoft study using command-line AI coding agents indicated that adopters merged around 24% more pull requests than they otherwise would have. It suggests that coding agents could have measurable productivity effects, rather than being only experimental tools.
That’s not to say Anthropic will hit its sales targets.
That does explain why organizations are ready to shell out big bucks for tools like Claude Code to some degree.
Anthropic still has to prove the economics work
The stakes are huge.
Anthropic still faces the specter of massive infrastructure costs, brutal competition, and the risk that AI pricing will decline as models become cheaper to train and run.
It’s competing not only with Google, Meta, and increasingly powerful open weight models but also with OpenAI.
The corporation is also asking investors to evaluate revenue that it has not yet earned.
A $200 billion estimate for 2028 does not mean $200 billion of sales realized.
That difference matters more and more as prices rise into the trillions.
Numbers investors should know
- $965 billion:Anthropic’s May 2026 funding-round valuation.
- $1.5 trillion: Reported secondary-market valuation in August.
- $2 trillion+: Potential IPO valuation under discussion.
- $47 billion+: Revenue run rate reached in May.
- $190 billion-$200 billion: 2028 revenue projection.
- $65 billion: Capital raised in Anthropic’s May Series H.
- $2.5 billion+: Claude Code run-rate revenue reported in February.
- 75%: Growth in paid-consumer revenue since January in TechCrunch’s analyzed data.
In the end, Anthropic may justify a trillion-dollar valuation.
The business is growing faster than most conventional public company frameworks are built to accommodate, and investors have already demonstrated a phenomenal readiness to pay for that expansion.
But the valuation hinges on public investors believing today’s spectacular growth can be maintained at a massive scale.
Increasing run-rate revenue from $9 billion to $47 billion is a significant step. Going from $47 billion to roughly $200 billion is another. That is what makes Anthropic’s IPO potentially historic. It will not simply test demand for another AI stock. It may test just how much of AI’s future Wall Street is willing to buy today.
Related: Anthropic spills the beans on reality of AI, jobs, and the economy
