Anthropic’s potential initial public offering has become one of the most closely watched events in the technology sector, with the AI lab reportedly preparing to go public on the strength of an internal forecast that it will generate between $190 billion and $200 billion in revenue by 2028. According to a Reuters exclusive, that previously unreported figure is already serving as the foundation for bankers and investors as they work to justify a valuation that could approach $2 trillion. The scale of the projection becomes clear when set against Anthropic’s current trajectory: the company’s revenue run rate stood at roughly $47 billion as of May 2026, up from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025, meaning the 2028 target implies revenue would more than quadruple again in just over two years. Such a leap is the kind of math that only finds acceptance inside a boom, yet Anthropic’s near-term momentum gives the forecast a degree of credibility that would have seemed implausible not long ago.
That momentum is rooted in figures that are, by any conventional standard, moving extraordinarily fast. Second-quarter revenue for 2026 is projected to reach at least $10.9 billion, more than double the prior quarter, and the company is said to be targeting its first quarterly operating profit of around $559 million. For a lab that has spent most of its existence burning cash, that would represent a genuine inflection point—and it is precisely this trajectory that allows bankers to argue the 2028 forecasts are not fantasy but extrapolation. Rather than pricing Anthropic on what it earns today, bankers are reportedly applying enterprise-value-to-revenue multiples to those 2028 projections, a two-years-forward approach that is rare in public markets but was previously used ahead of the flotations of Cerebras and SpaceX. The method is designed for companies growing too quickly to be valued in the present tense. For context, Palantir trades at roughly 53 times its expected 2026 revenue, while SpaceX and Cloudflare sit at around 41.6 times; applied across Anthropic’s projected 2028 haul, such stretch multiples begin to make the eye-watering headline figures look, if not sober, then at least internally consistent.
The central catch is that the entire calculation borrows heavily from the future, assuming that today’s enthusiasm survives long enough to meet the revenue it is pricing in—and not everyone is convinced it will. „Could they get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time,” said David Merkel of Aleph Investments, neatly capturing the gap between what a hot market will pay on the day and what it will tolerate a year later. The caveat sits in the cost base: heavy spending on GPUs, compute, and model training is pressing on current margins, and the bull case rests on the assumption that those costs fall as a share of revenue as the business scales. If they do not, the two-years-forward logic starts to wobble, because the whole exercise trades present profitability for future size. The wider risk is that the entire edifice depends on a forecast holding in a market that could turn; cheaper rivals are already threatening the economics underpinning these valuations, and a two-years-forward multiple is only ever as good as the year it is pointed at.
The valuation conversation has been climbing for months. Anthropic has already attracted investor offers at an $800 billion valuation and has been reported to be eyeing something closer to $900 billion in a mooted $50 billion round, with IPO chatter now nudging toward the $2 trillion mark that once sounded fanciful. For now, the story is the sort that raises a European eyebrow: dazzling growth, real questions about margins, and a valuation resting almost entirely on a number nobody can yet check. Anthropic may well hit $200 billion in revenue by 2028, and its recent run of results gives that ambition more credibility than it once had. But the market is being asked to price the company as though that arrival is already booked—and to do so two full years before the receipts come in.
Ez a cikk a Neural News AI (V1) verziójával készült.
Forrás: https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-ipo-190-200bn-2028-revenue-forecast.