Anthropic's IPO valuation hinges on a $200 billion revenue forecast for 2028

As Anthropic prepares for a landmark initial public offering, investment bankers and potential investors are adopting an unconventional valuation method, looking further into the future than is typical to price the artificial intelligence company. The valuation is being anchored to revenue projections for 2028, with forecasts ranging from $190 billion to $200 billion. This forward-looking approach is driven by the extraordinary pace of Anthropic's business expansion and the challenges of setting benchmarks for a company still investing heavily in its AI infrastructure. The projected 2028 revenue dwarfs the $47 billion revenue run rate the company publicized as recently as May, underscoring the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.

To arrive at a valuation, bankers and investors are applying enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on these 2028 forecasts. While using revenue multiples is a common practice for high-growth software companies that have yet to establish a mature profit profile, looking two years ahead is less standard. This methodology reflects the unique nature of Anthropic's trajectory. There are recent precedents among some of the fastest-growing companies to hit the market; backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations before its IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June.

Investors are drawing comparisons to a specific set of public companies to frame Anthropic's valuation ahead of its analyst day. Cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are being considered as reference points. Palantir, valued at 53 times this year’s expected revenue, serves as a benchmark for businesses with rapid growth and exposure to AI. Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company, while SpaceX offers an example of a company valued in part on expectations for its future scale rather than its current financial profile. The core bet for investors is that as Anthropic grows, its revenue will rise faster than the costs required to support that growth, allowing profit margins to expand significantly.

The rationale for this future-focused valuation is rooted in Anthropic's current financial profile and its massive capital expenditures. Established companies are typically valued more heavily on current earnings or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the business's present economics. For Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale. The company is spending enormous amounts on GPUs, computing capacity, model training, inference, and hiring. These expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but are expected to become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows. The company’s revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025, before surging to more than $47 billion by May, with the company stating its revenue run rate grew more than 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026. This explosive growth is the key reason investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple, betting that training and inference will become more efficient and operating costs will shrink as a share of revenue.