Analysis
Anthropic's path to an IPO is being priced on a bet about 2028, not 2026. According to a Reuters exclusive citing people familiar with the company's financials, Anthropic's IPO valuation hinges on a projected 2028 revenue figure of $190 billion to $200 billion -- a number that dwarfs the run-rate the company had publicized as recently as May, roughly a fourfold jump. Bankers and investors are reportedly using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples applied to that forward number, a valuation technique common for high-growth software companies that haven't yet reached a mature profit profile, but rarely stretched three full years into the future at this scale.
The logic behind reaching that far forward is straightforward on paper: Anthropic's current spending is heavily weighted toward training and inference infrastructure, and the bet is that both get meaningfully cheaper per unit of output as the technology matures, while headcount and other operating costs shrink as a share of revenue the way they do for any software company scaling into its fixed costs. What's unusual is how much of the current valuation rests on that assumption actually playing out on schedule, rather than on revenue and margin trends already visible in the numbers today.
The competitive backdrop makes the bet riskier, not safer
This forecast isn't happening in a vacuum. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, announced September 3, matched Anthropic's own pricing on several benchmarks while claiming a lead on coding and cybersecurity tasks, and Pulse has tracked all three frontier labs -- OpenAI, Google and Anthropic -- shipping their highest-risk-tier cybersecurity models within roughly the same two-week window in late August and early September. That kind of competitive lockstep is exactly the dynamic that tends to compress pricing power rather than expand it: when three well-capitalized rivals ship comparable capability within days of each other, it gets harder for any one of them to hold premium pricing long enough to hit a four-year-out revenue target built on today's list prices.
Google's financial relationship with Anthropic adds a wrinkle worth naming directly: Google has committed up to $40 billion to Anthropic in stages, with a large tranche already funded at a $350 billion valuation. That makes Google both Anthropic's largest strategic backer and, through its own Gemini line, one of the three competitors whose product releases are part of what could compress the margins this IPO math depends on -- an alignment of incentives that cuts in genuinely ambiguous directions depending on which Google business unit you're asking.
The honest read here is that a $190-200 billion 2028 revenue forecast is not obviously wrong -- enterprise AI spend has grown faster than most forecasters expected in each of the last three years, and Anthropic has captured a real and growing share of it. But it is also not a number with much historical precedent to check it against: no software company has scaled from a $47 billion run-rate to $190-200 billion of actual revenue in three years before, which means public-market investors pricing this IPO will be underwriting a first-of-its-kind growth curve rather than extrapolating a demonstrated one. If inference costs fall more slowly than modeled, or if GPT-6 Astra and Gemini's next releases hold share better than assumed, the gap shows up first in gross margin -- a number equity investors can see quarter to quarter, unlike a revenue forecast three years out.
What to watch is less the eventual IPO price and more the S-1 disclosures themselves, whenever they arrive: the actual gross margin trajectory over the last four to six quarters will tell outside investors far more about whether the 2028 number is achievable than any banker's forward multiple can.
