Analysis
Shares of Anthropic are changing hands on secondary markets at an implied valuation of $1.2 trillion, according to Caplight, a platform that tracks private-company secondary trading -- a roughly 550% surge in about a year that has, for the first time, pushed the Claude maker's implied value past rival OpenAI's roughly $908 billion secondary mark. Caplight CEO Javier Avalos called Anthropic "the most sought-after company the venture secondary market has ever seen."
The important caveat is what a secondary print actually measures. Unlike Anthropic's real primary round -- a $65 billion Series H closed in May at a $965 billion valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital -- the $1.2 trillion figure comes from a market with almost no genuine transaction volume. Nearly every existing shareholder is holding ahead of Anthropic's planned October 2026 IPO rather than selling, which means the $1.2 trillion price reflects the intensity of buyer demand against near-zero available supply, not a broad-based market consensus on fair value.
“Claude Code, the company's fastest-growing product line, alone reached $2.5 billion in annualized revenue by February 2026.”
What makes the scarcity premium at least partially justifiable is the underlying growth: Anthropic's disclosed annualized revenue run rate crossed $47 billion as of its Series H announcement, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 and just $1 billion a year before that. Claude Code, the company's fastest-growing product line, alone reached $2.5 billion in annualized revenue by February 2026. Anthropic now counts 8 of the Fortune 10 and approximately 70% of the Fortune 100 as enterprise customers, with more than 1,000 companies each spending over $1 million annually on the platform.
For allocators without access to primary rounds, the secondary market gap between Anthropic's $965 billion primary mark and its $1.2 trillion secondary print is itself useful information: it's a real-time gauge of how much more institutional and family-office demand exists for AI-lab exposure than the primary market is currently able to satisfy. That gap tends to compress once an IPO actually creates liquid, tradable supply -- which is exactly why October's planned listing matters far beyond Anthropic itself.
For LPs and secondary-market participants, the lesson is to treat scarcity-driven marks with real skepticism until an actual liquidity event tests them -- a $1.2 trillion print built on near-zero seller volume can compress quickly once large blocks of stock become tradable post-IPO. What to watch next: whether Anthropic's actual IPO pricing, whenever it lands, comes in above or below the $1.2 trillion secondary mark, and whether OpenAI's own competing IPO process narrows or widens the valuation gap between the two labs.
