Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude family of models, is preparing what could become the largest initial public offering in history. Bankers advising the company have told potential investors it could raise more than $100 billion in a listing that values the five-year-old startup at around $2 trillion, according to multiple reports citing sources familiar with the discussions.

The figures, first detailed by The New York Times and corroborated by Bloomberg and other outlets this week, would surpass the record set by SpaceX earlier in 2026. SpaceX went public at a valuation of approximately $1.77 trillion and raised about $85.7 billion. Anthropic’s proposed raise would exceed that mark and place the company among the most valuable publicly traded firms in the world, alongside Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia.

Anthropic has not publicly confirmed the exact valuation target or timeline. Senior executives have not set a formal target even in private discussions, according to the Financial Times. A public filing could come as soon as late August, with a possible listing in October. The company confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2026, giving it the option to proceed once market conditions allow.

The valuation ambitions rest on extraordinary revenue growth. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate—a metric that projects full-year sales from recent performance—reached more than $65 billion by the end of July 2026. That figure is up from about $47 billion in May and roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. Investors expect the run rate to climb further to between $100 billion and $120 billion by year-end.

Preliminary second-quarter 2026 revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, more than doubling the prior quarter and representing a roughly 14-fold increase from the same period a year earlier. The company has also reported positive adjusted operating income in recent periods. Internal forecasts shared with investors project 2028 revenue in the range of $190 billion to $200 billion.

Much of the acceleration has been attributed to enterprise adoption of Claude, particularly coding and agentic tools. Claude Code, which became widely available in 2025, has driven significant demand from developers and companies integrating AI into software engineering workflows. API and enterprise usage account for the large majority of revenue, with consumer subscriptions playing a smaller role.

Anthropic’s last private funding round, a $65 billion Series H closed in May 2026, valued the company at $965 billion post-money. That round more than doubled its prior $380 billion valuation from February. Secondary market trading has since pushed implied valuations higher, with some platforms showing figures above $1.2 trillion in recent months.

The company was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei. It has positioned itself as a safety-focused alternative in the frontier AI race, emphasizing constitutional AI techniques and careful scaling. Backers include major venture firms, sovereign wealth funds, and strategic partners such as Amazon and Google, which have provided both capital and cloud infrastructure.

A successful IPO at the discussed scale would unlock substantial liquidity for early investors and employees while providing Anthropic with a large capital base for continued model development, chip investments, and infrastructure. The company has been exploring its own custom silicon and has secured significant compute commitments from partners including AMD.

Public markets will scrutinize the sustainability of the growth. Valuation experts have noted that justifying a $2 trillion market capitalization under reasonable assumptions about margins and discount rates would require Anthropic to reach roughly $1.2 trillion in annual revenue within a decade—an ambitious target even by the standards of the current AI boom. Competition remains intense from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, and Chinese labs, while capital intensity for training and inference continues to rise.

The timing also places Anthropic ahead of OpenAI in the public-markets race. OpenAI has been preparing its own listing but is widely expected to follow in 2027. Anthropic’s faster revenue trajectory and earlier confidential filing have given it a first-mover advantage in capturing investor attention for frontier AI equities.

Regulatory and geopolitical factors will form part of the IPO narrative. Anthropic has engaged with U.S. policymakers on AI safety and has navigated export-control and national-security considerations that affect advanced model deployment. Any public prospectus will need to address risks around model capabilities, cybersecurity, data privacy, and competition.

If the offering proceeds on the reported scale, it will mark a defining moment for the AI industry’s transition from private funding to public capital markets. The combination of rapid commercial traction, a high-profile product franchise in Claude, and ambitious long-term revenue projections has created one of the most closely watched potential listings of the decade.

Market conditions, final SEC review, and investor appetite for AI growth stories will determine the ultimate size and valuation. For now, the discussions alone underscore how quickly Anthropic has moved from research lab to one of the most valuable technology companies on the planet.