Anthropic is preparing for what could become one of the largest technology listings on record, and investors are being asked to value the artificial-intelligence company using revenue forecasts much further into the future than is typical for a conventional IPO. Reuters reports that people familiar with Anthropic’s financials say the company is projecting roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue for 2028, a figure that has not previously been reported.
The estimate is dramatically above Anthropic’s recently disclosed business run rate. The company said in May that its annualized revenue pace had reached about $47 billion, while Reuters says Anthropic has projected at least $10.9 billion of revenue for the second quarter of 2026 and is on track for its first quarterly operating profit of about $559 million. The gap between today’s scale and the 2028 projection explains both the enthusiasm and the risk surrounding any eventual IPO valuation.
Wall Street is looking two years ahead to price Anthropic
Reuters says bankers and investors are using enterprise-value-to-revenue multiples applied to forward forecasts, rather than relying primarily on current earnings. Revenue multiples are common for fast-growing software businesses that have not yet developed mature profit margins, but using a forecast two years ahead is less typical. The approach reflects the extraordinary speed of Anthropic’s growth and the difficulty of valuing an AI company that is still spending enormous sums on GPUs, model training, inference capacity and technical hiring.
Cloudflare, Palantir and SpaceX are emerging as reference points
Public-market comparisons are becoming an important part of the discussion. People familiar with the process told Reuters that Cloudflare, Palantir and SpaceX are among the companies being considered as valuation reference points ahead of Anthropic’s analyst day. LSEG data cited by Reuters showed Palantir valued at about 53 times expected 2026 revenue, while SpaceX and Cloudflare were each trading around 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue. Each comparison highlights a different part of Anthropic’s story: AI exposure, infrastructure-like growth, or a valuation built heavily on expectations for future scale.
Anthropic’s growth is fast, but the cost base remains enormous
Anthropic’s financial trajectory has changed quickly. Reuters reports that the company’s revenue run rate was around $9 billion at the end of 2025 before rising above $47 billion by May 2026, and Anthropic has said its run rate grew more than tenfold annually in each of the three years through early 2026. Investors are betting that revenue can continue rising faster than the cost of computing, training and staff, allowing margins to expand as the company reaches greater scale.
A blockbuster IPO would test how far AI valuations can stretch
The central question is whether public-market investors will accept a valuation that depends heavily on revenue Anthropic may not generate until 2028. Reuters notes that there are precedents: investors referenced 2028 revenue expectations before Cerebras Systems’ IPO, while SpaceX projections extended as far as 2029 before its public listing at a record valuation in June. Even so, Anthropic would be testing the market at a time when investors have become more sensitive to the enormous capital requirements of AI infrastructure and to whether AI spending can ultimately produce enough productivity and profit to justify extreme valuations.
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Anthropic has not publicly confirmed the $190 billion to $200 billion 2028 revenue projection reported by Reuters, and the eventual IPO terms could change before a listing. But the figures show how aggressively Wall Street is being asked to think about the next phase of the AI economy: not simply how much money the leading model companies earn today, but how large their businesses could become if enterprise adoption, coding tools, agents and AI infrastructure continue scaling at their current pace.
