Anthropic’s $1T IPO could depend on revenue it hasn’t made yet

Anthropic is being priced on the money it hopes to make two years from now rather than what it earns today. This could change how investors judge the growing number of AI companies preparing for the public markets.

The AI firm has reportedly told people involved in its offering that it expects revenue of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028. The figure had not previously been reported. The bigger story is how bankers are using it. They are looking far ahead to value a changing business.

Pricing on revenue two years out

A Reuters report mentioned that banks and investors in the deal were using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on projections to assess valuation. This method is standard for growth-stage software companies still working to achieve steady profits. Making predictions two years into the future is a rather bold gamble.

Anthropic’s current business operations and its goal for 2028 are miles apart. The company reported a revenue run rate of $47 billion in May. Hitting the annual target of $190 billion to $200 billion would require almost fourfold growth in the company’s revenue trajectory.

The numbers offer a useful valuation benchmark. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion after raising $65 billion in May. If that valuation is compared with the newly reported $190 billion to $200 billion 2028 revenue forecast, it works out to roughly 4.8x to 5.1x forward revenue.

That is not the enterprise value-to-revenue multiple the report says bankers are using, since $965 billion is a post-money valuation. But it provides a useful way to think about the price: if Anthropic actually reaches its 2028 target, today’s valuation would amount to roughly five times annual revenue.

The comparison is noticeable. As reported, Palantir trades at approximately 53 times its projected revenue, while SpaceX and Cloudflare trade at 41.6 times. The figures cannot be directly compared due to their use of 2026 revenues as opposed to 2028 revenues. However, the difference still suggests that Anthropic might not need high AI multiples at the moment if it succeeds in achieving the projections.

Why the two-year forecast matters for rivals

Anthropic is not the first company to solicit long-term thinking from investors. Cerebras Systems’ investors were cited by Reuters as having revenue projections extending to 2028 prior to the company going public, with SpaceX making forecasts up to 2029 before it listed in June. Longer-term projections have been useful in supporting valuations that could not have been justified with near-term revenue.

This precedent is important to Anthropic, which confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC in June, following a $965 million funding round in May. According to a previous report by Cryptopolitan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are some of the banks involved in the IPO process.

Bankers have advised both Anthropic and OpenAI that the first one to launch would create a model for the entire industry. Therefore, the valuation calculations of Anthropic are relevant not only for its IPO. If investors embrace a two-year-forward revenue model, other emerging AI companies may find it easier to justify their valuations based on what they expect their businesses to do in the future rather than where they are today.

Spending is the number investors are underwriting

The forecast is contingent on costs ceasing to grow as quickly as revenue. As reported by Reuters, Anthropic is still spending large amounts of money on computing resources, model building and hiring. The hope is that revenue will eventually grow faster than those expenses.

The broader artificial intelligence industry illustrates what a challenging proposition this is. The 2026 AI Index, released by Stanford University, estimates that global investment in corporate artificial intelligence amounted to $581.7 billion for 2025, an increase of 130% compared to the previous year.

Gartner expects global spending on AI-optimized infrastructure-as-a-service to increase by 96% by 2026 to approximately $42 billion, with a further increase of 56.5% in 2027. This shows the amount of investment needed to support AI workloads.

For Anthropic, this means a trade-off between more compute capacity enabling revenue generation and spending.

This means that investors are backing a target of revenue of more than $ 200 billion. They believe that Anthropic can convert that scale into strong enough economics in a short time to support its valuation.

When taking into account a factor of approximately five times the projected revenue of 2028, the $ 965 billion valuation might not be as demanding should Anthropic hit those numbers. On the other hand, if the company generates no revenue or the costs turn out to be high, the valuation might become much more difficult to support.

On Wall Street, Anthropic’s 2028 projection is treated as more than just a goal for growth. It serves as the denominator in calculating the valuation that approaches the $ 1 trillion mark.