Anthropic is preparing for what could become one of the world’s biggest IPOs, with investors and bankers looking beyond the AI firm’s current performance and towards 2028 to assess how much the company could be worth.Two people familiar with Anthropic’s financials portfolio told Reuters that the company is forecasting revenue of about $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028. That estimate is far above the $47 billion revenue run rate the company disclosed in May, underlining the extent of the expansion being factored into its prospective valuation.Bankers and investors are applying enterprise value-to-revenue multiples to projected figures. Such multiples are widely used for fast-growing software companies that have not yet reached a mature profit profile.Using estimates two years into the future, however, is less usual. People familiar with the process said this reflects both the speed of Anthropic’s expansion and the difficulty of finding appropriate benchmarks for a company still committing large sums to AI infrastructure.Anthropic’s spending on computing capacity, model training and hiring is putting pressure on its margins. The scale of AI investment has also contributed to recent pullbacks in several highly valued technology stocks, including some companies considered comparable to Anthropic.Still, other fast-growing companies have used longer-term projections in their path to public markets. Backers of Cerebras Systems pointed to 2028 revenue expectations before its IPO this year, while SpaceX’s projections went as far as 2029 before it went public at a record valuation in June, the people said.Palantir, Cloudflare and SpaceX in focusInvestors are looking at a range of companies to establish a valuation framework for Anthropic ahead of its analyst day. The list includes cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir and SpaceX, according to the people.Comparable companies are a key part of IPO pricing because they provide a reference for how businesses with similar growth rates or models are valued. They can also help investors decide which revenue or earnings multiples to apply to financial forecasts.Palantir is valued at 53 times its expected revenue for this year, while SpaceX and Cloudflare are each trading at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, according to LSEG data.The three companies provide different reference points. Palantir is used by investors as a benchmark for rapidly expanding businesses with AI exposure. Cloudflare offers a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company. SpaceX, meanwhile, demonstrates how expectations around future scale can form part of a company’s valuation even when current financial performance is not the primary basis.Current spending clouds the profit pictureAnthropic’s present earnings do not necessarily show the economics investors expect from the company once it reaches greater scale.The company is spending heavily on GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and recruitment. While these costs are supporting its expansion, investors expect them to decline as a proportion of revenue as the business grows.The change in Anthropic’s revenue run rate has been rapid. It stood at about $9 billion at the end of 2025 and had climbed above $47 billion by May, Reuters reported.For the second quarter of 2026, Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion, more than twice the previous quarter. It is also on track to report its first quarterly operating profit, at $559 million.The company has said its revenue run rate increased more than 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026.That growth is central to the decision to use 2028 projections in assessing the company’s valuation. Investors are effectively betting that the money Anthropic is spending now will support much larger revenue and improved margins later.The company could also see greater efficiency in training and inference as technology develops, while personnel and other operating costs could make up a smaller portion of revenue as the business expands.
