Anthropic (NASDAQ:ANTP) could be heading towards one of the largest initial public offerings on record, but determining an appropriate valuation is requiring Wall Street to look considerably further ahead than usual. Bankers and investors are reportedly basing their calculations partly on how much revenue the artificial intelligence company could generate two years from now.
Anthropic expects revenue of approximately $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028, according to two people familiar with its finances. The previously unreported projection is dramatically higher than the $47 billion revenue “run rate” the company disclosed as recently as May, highlighting the extraordinary growth assumptions underpinning potential IPO valuations.
Four sources said bankers and investors are applying enterprise value-to-revenue multiples to forward forecasts.
Revenue multiples are routinely used for rapidly expanding software businesses that have yet to develop mature profitability. Looking two years ahead, however, is less conventional and reflects both Anthropic’s exceptional growth rate and the difficulty of valuing a company still investing heavily in AI infrastructure.
Recent concerns about the enormous amounts of capital being committed to artificial intelligence have already contributed to pullbacks in several prominent technology stocks, including companies regarded as potential valuation peers for Anthropic.
There are precedents for using longer-range projections for exceptionally fast-growing businesses. Investors in Cerebras Systems referred to 2028 revenue expectations ahead of its IPO this year, while SpaceX projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June, according to the sources.
Anthropic’s valuation challenge centres on the substantial costs of computing power, model training and recruitment, which continue to pressure margins. Investors are effectively betting that revenue will eventually expand faster than the expenses required to support the company’s growth, allowing profitability to improve as the business scales.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Investors search for suitable valuation comparisons
Cloudflare, Palantir and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are among the publicly traded businesses being considered as reference points for Anthropic’s valuation ahead of the company’s analyst day, according to people familiar with the process.
Comparable publicly listed companies play an important role in IPO pricing because they provide investors with benchmarks for businesses considered to have similar growth prospects or operating characteristics. Selecting the appropriate peer group can influence which revenue or earnings multiples are applied to financial projections.
Palantir is currently valued at 53 times expected revenue for this year, placing it among the most highly valued stocks on Wall Street. SpaceX and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times projected 2026 revenue, according to LSEG data.
Each comparison offers investors a different perspective. Palantir has emerged as a benchmark for rapidly growing companies with substantial AI exposure, while Cloudflare represents a high-growth combination of software and infrastructure. SpaceX, meanwhile, provides an example of a company whose valuation reflects expectations for its eventual scale as much as its present financial position.
Investors look beyond Anthropic’s current earnings
More established companies are generally valued heavily on earnings or EBITDA, giving investors a clearer indication of their underlying economics.
For Anthropic, current EBITDA may provide a less useful measure of the profitability investors expect the company to achieve once it reaches greater scale.
The company is spending heavily on GPUs and other computing infrastructure, model training, inference and recruitment. While those investments are essential to support its rapid expansion, investors expect them to represent a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows.
Anthropic’s recent financial trajectory demonstrates the pace of that expansion. Its revenue run rate stood at approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025 before rising to more than $47 billion by May.
The company has projected at least $10.9 billion of revenue for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, while forecasting its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
Anthropic has also said its revenue run rate increased more than tenfold annually in each of the three years through early 2026.
That rapid expansion helps explain why investors are willing to extend their valuation models as far as 2028.
The underlying assumption is that today’s substantial spending is financing a company capable of producing much greater revenue and stronger margins in the future. Improvements in technology could reduce the relative cost of model training and inference, while personnel and other operating expenses may decline as a proportion of sales as Anthropic expands.
“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 investment firm Aleph Investments.
“Does it (AI) really produce so much additional productivity… These are just questions that we have to ask if we were thinking of pricing this, buying this.”