Anthropic picks Nasdaq for $2 trillion IPO, eyes October listing

Anthropic's reported choice of Nasdaq caps a year in which its private valuation has already moved sharply. Its Series H funding round in May valued the company at $965 billion, and secondary-market transactions have reportedly pushed its implied valuation higher since, with estimates now ranging from roughly $1.05 trillion to $1.5 trillion. If the IPO values Anthropic at $2 trillion or more, it would surpass the $1.75 trillion valuation of Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s listing in June.

The financial picture Anthropic is said to be showing investors is unusually specific for a pre-IPO company. Revenue rose roughly 14-fold year over year in the second quarter to $11.5 billion, while annualized revenue reached $65 billion by the end of July, up from $9 billion at the end of last year. Its expected margin figures come with an important qualifier: gross margins above 80% are cited before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners like Amazon.com and the cost of training its models. Amazon is Anthropic's largest cumulative investor, with a stake of roughly $8 billion, and AWS serves as the company's primary training cloud.

The path to a public listing now hinges on disclosure. Rather than releasing its IPO prospectus publicly last week as expected, Anthropic shared documents with a small group of investors first, fielding their questions before making the filing public, according to the Financial Times report. Investors are forecasting Anthropic will end the year with $120 billion in annualized revenue and close 2027 with nearly triple that figure, per analyst Joey Brookhart of SemiAnalysis. Meanwhile, CEO Dario Amodei has called on the industry to "pace the frontier," a position echoed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, who said the ChatGPT maker will remain private this year because of AI safety concerns — a contrast that may shape how Anthropic's own listing is read.