London, 12 August 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — By Anthony Gill
Shareholders in Anthropic expect the company to list as early as October at more than $2trn, according to the Financial Times, which would make it the largest initial public offering ever completed. The company was valued at $965bn in a May funding round, so investors are betting the public market will more than double it.
The comparison is SpaceX, which priced in June at $135 a share for a $1.77trn valuation and raised $75bn — itself more than double Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are leading the Anthropic offering. The company filed confidentially with the SEC in June and is in a quiet period, so it cannot comment on its own numbers.
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SubscribeThe Growth Is the Argument
Everything rests on the revenue curve, and the curve is genuinely unusual.
Anthropic reported an annualised run rate above $47bn in May. Investors interviewed by the FT expect $100bn to $120bn by the end of this year — more than ten times where it started 2026. That is roughly 800% annual growth at a scale where growth normally decelerates.
One investor’s arithmetic: a company compounding at that rate could trade at 30 times revenue, which implies $3trn. Palantir and Nebius have recently traded near 55 times. On those comparisons $2trn looks conservative, which is precisely the sort of sentence that appears near the top of a market.
Anthropic was valued at $183bn in September 2025, $380bn in February and $965bn in May. Nothing about that is normal, and no multiple derived from it is reliable.
What the Bulls Are Not Pricing
Three things, and only one is about competition.
Concentration. Anthropic’s revenue is heavily enterprise, weighted towards software engineering. That is a real and defensible market, and it is narrower than a consumer platform. Enterprise budgets are also the first thing reviewed when growth slows.
Regulatory exposure. US export restrictions forced Anthropic to withdraw two models briefly in June. The models returned within weeks, but the episode unsettled customers and slowed growth temporarily. A company whose product can be suspended by a Commerce Department decision carries a risk that does not appear in a revenue multiple.
The financing structure. Anthropic’s compute is not bought outright. As we reported this month, a $150bn programme routes Google’s chips through special purpose vehicles that lease hardware to Anthropic, with Broadcom guaranteeing roughly $31bn of the debt. The hardware sits off Anthropic’s balance sheet — convenient for a company preparing to list, and a set of obligations that public shareholders will now need to understand.
Where Europe Sits
Nowhere, which is the point worth making for readers here.
The three largest listings of the past eighteen months — SpaceX, SK Hynix, now Anthropic — are American or Asian. European institutions can buy the shares. They cannot host the company.
That is the same absence visible in Europe’s technology funding and in the Chips Act’s focus on fabrication rather than capital formation. Europe produces the research and imports the equity, and the gap has widened every year since 2021.
The Upshot
My view is that the revenue growth is real and the valuation is a bet on it continuing at a rate almost nothing sustains.
Ten times revenue growth in twelve months is not a narrative — it is a number, and it is unusual enough to justify serious money. Anthropic has also taken enterprise share from better-capitalised rivals, which is harder than raising it.
But $2trn prices in several more years of the same. It assumes competition does not compress margins, that models sustain their pricing, that Washington stays cooperative, and that the leasing structures financing the compute hold. Four independent assumptions, priced as one.
The honest position is that nobody knows, including the people quoting 30 times revenue. What is knowable is that the public market is about to price a frontier AI company for the first time, and every private valuation in the sector will be marked against whatever number comes out. that is the significant event here, and it happens in October — as with the robotics listings in Shanghai, the demand is arriving well ahead of the evidence.
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