Investors eye $2trn Anthropic valuation in record IPO

Fervour for a massive valuation comes as a result of Anthropic’s rapidly growing revenue, sources told the FT.

Investors expect Anthropic to be valued at $2trn or more in its October initial public offering, potentially doubling initial targets of $1trn and dwarfing SpaceX as the largest public listing in history.

Several of the company’s investors told the Financial Times (FT) that the fervour for a massive valuation comes as a result of Anthropic’s rapidly growing revenue, which reportedly hit nearly $11bn in the second quarter of this year – more than double the $4.8bn of the first quarter.

The AI giant, which filed to go public in June, is yet to fix on a valuation, the FT reported.

The company’s backers expect the five-year-old AI giant to reach an annualised revenue of between $100bn and $120bn this year.

Anthropic’s Claude AI products are repeat headline-makers as it competes for leadership in the space with its biggest rival OpenAI – which also hopes to go public – and the more recent crop of Chinese-made models taking the industry by storm with their cheaper alternatives.

Confident backers – including venture capitalists, other industry giants and institutional investors – have poured nearly $100bn into Anthropic just this year, fuelling the business as it looks to build its own AI chips to keep up with surging demand.

Last month, AMD pledged $5bn to Anthropic in a deal that also allows the AI giant access to 2GW of AMD’s latest-generation chips. In April, Amazon announced plans to pour up to $25bn into Anthropic, which in turn pledged to spend around $100bn over the next 10 years on the e-commerce juggernaut’s cloud technologies.

While Anthropic does not share details of how many use Claude, Statista placed it at around 245m monthly users as of June this year. Comparatively, OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached 1bn users in May.

Despite this, Anthropic trumped OpenAI’s valuation earlier this year, owing to its growing share of the more lucrative enterprise sector, where it has been capturing a higher volume of first-time users.

Earlier this year, the US government temporarily banned Anthropic from exporting two of its highly capable cybersecurity models over security concerns.

While that ban was eventually lifted after a little more than two weeks, sources told the FT that Anthropic’s June revenue suffered as a result. The company, however, rebounded at an “extraordinary rate” once the ban was lifted, they said.

Anthropic is separately embroiled in an ongoing legal battle with the US government over the banning of its products for official use.

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