Anthropic is asking prospective investors to look unusually far into the future as it prepares for a potential blockbuster initial public offering, with bankers and investors using the company’s projected 2028 revenue to assess how much the artificial intelligence developer could be worth.
The Claude maker is projecting revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028, according to two people familiar with its financials cited by Reuters. The forecast represents an extraordinary jump from the more than $47 billion annualized revenue run rate Anthropic reported in May and illustrates the scale of growth investors would be expected to price into the company ahead of a potential public listing.
Rather than relying primarily on current earnings, investors and bankers are using enterprise-value-to-revenue multiples applied to future projections, according to four people familiar with the process. That approach is common for rapidly expanding software companies that have yet to establish mature profit margins, but using forecasts two years into the future highlights the unusual difficulty of valuing an AI company whose financial profile is changing at exceptional speed.
Register for the next Tekedia Mini-MBA.
Register for Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and co-invest in great global startups.
Anthropic’s latest projections come as the company attempts to establish itself as one of the leading commercial AI platforms while spending heavily on computing infrastructure, model development, and personnel. The central question for investors is whether revenue can continue expanding faster than the enormous costs required to support increasingly capable AI systems.
The company’s recent financial performance has strengthened that case.
Anthropic’s revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025 before climbing to more than $47 billion by May 2026. The company has projected second-quarter revenue of at least $10.9 billion and was on track for its first quarterly operating profit of about $559 million, according to people familiar with its financials.
Separate documents seen by Bloomberg showed preliminary second-quarter revenue of more than $11.5 billion, compared with $787 million a year earlier and $4.73 billion in the first quarter. The figures remain subject to revision.
The pace of expansion has put Anthropic in a direct contest with OpenAI for corporate AI customers, particularly in areas such as software development and coding. Anthropic’s annualized revenue has surpassed $47 billion, while OpenAI’s annualized revenue has topped $40 billion, although the companies may calculate their run rates differently.
Investors Are Being Asked to Price The Future
The proposed valuation methodology highlights a fundamental problem facing investors in AI companies: traditional measures such as current earnings provide limited insight into businesses still spending aggressively to build their competitive position.
Anthropic is investing heavily in GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference, and hiring. Those expenses suppress current profitability, but investors are effectively being asked to assume that the costs will decline as a percentage of revenue as the company reaches greater scale.
The underlying investment thesis is straightforward. If Anthropic can continue adding customers and increase usage of its models while improving computing efficiency, revenue could grow substantially faster than operating costs. Higher utilization, more efficient models and declining computing costs could then allow margins to expand.
The risk is that the opposite could happen. AI companies are locked in an infrastructure race that requires enormous capital commitments, while competition from OpenAI, Google, Meta and Chinese developers could force companies to spend more to maintain technological leadership.
That makes the $190 billion to $200 billion 2028 revenue forecast particularly important. Investors are not simply evaluating what Anthropic is earning today. They are assessing whether the company can become a business capable of generating hundreds of billions of dollars in annual sales within a relatively short period.
Palantir, Cloudflare and SpaceX Emerge As Valuation Benchmarks
Anthropic is also looking for public-company comparisons that can help investors determine an appropriate revenue multiple. Cloudflare, Palantir and SpaceX are among the companies being considered as reference points ahead of Anthropic’s analyst day, according to people familiar with the process.
Each provides a different valuation framework.
Palantir has become an important benchmark for investors valuing companies with rapid growth and significant exposure to AI. The company trades at roughly 53 times expected 2026 revenue, according to LSEG data.
Cloudflare, meanwhile, offers a comparison with a high-growth software and internet infrastructure company and trades at about 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue. SpaceX also trades at roughly 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, although its business mix and capital requirements differ substantially from Anthropic’s.
Applying those kinds of multiples to Anthropic’s projected 2028 revenue could produce an enormous valuation, potentially pushing the company into the ranks of the world’s most valuable businesses.
But the comparison also demonstrates the risk. High revenue multiples require investors to maintain confidence in exceptionally strong future growth. Any slowdown in customer adoption, pricing pressure, or deterioration in AI margins could cause those multiples to contract sharply.
Anthropic’s IPO Could Reshape the AI Market
The potential listing would be significant beyond Anthropic itself. Analysts have touted it to become one of the largest tests yet of whether public-market investors are willing to assign extraordinary valuations to AI companies based largely on future scale.
The IPO would also arrive as investors have become more sensitive to the enormous capital requirements of the AI boom. Heavy spending on data centers, GPUs and electricity has contributed to concerns that the financial returns from AI could take longer to materialize than expected.
There have already been precedents for investors looking well beyond a company’s current earnings when valuing high-growth AI businesses. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue projections ahead of its IPO, while SpaceX investors considered forecasts extending to 2029 before its public debut.
Anthropic’s case, however, is unusually large because the projected revenue base is so substantial. The company is also preparing for a potential IPO before OpenAI, while Chinese AI company DeepSeek is reportedly considering a listing as well. That could turn the next phase of the AI race into a competition not only for customers, computing power and talent, but also for public-market capital.
For investors, the central question will be whether Anthropic’s extraordinary growth can translate into durable economics.
“Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time,” said David Merkel, a principal at Aleph Investments.
The bigger issue, he said, is whether AI will generate enough additional productivity to justify such valuations.
That question is likely to sit at the center of Anthropic’s IPO. The company’s projected $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue may demonstrate the size of the opportunity, but investors will ultimately have to decide how much of that future growth is already embedded in the price.