Anthropic booked more than $11.5 billion in preliminary Q2 revenue, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News, a more-than-14-fold jump from the $787 million it recorded in the same quarter of 2025. It’s also more than the roughly $10 billion the company booked across all of last year, and it clears Anthropic’s own internal projection of at least $10.9 billion. Q1 came in at $4.73 billion. The June quarter is expected to deliver a first operating profit of $559 million.

Half a dozen backers told the Financial Times they now expect an October IPO at $2 trillion or more, which would eclipse SpaceX’s record $1.77 trillion June debut and roughly double Anthropic’s $965 billion post-money valuation from its Series G in February.

The confidential SEC filing lodged in June, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase on the deal, arrived when Anthropic’s annualized run-rate revenue was $47 billion in May, already ahead of OpenAI’s disclosed rate of over $40 billion. Investors now expect $100 billion to $120 billion in annualized revenue by year-end, more than tenfold growth in seven months.

The multiples debate is where the exercise gets creative. Bankers are benchmarking to a Palantir-style 53-times-expected-revenue multiple applied to a projected 2028 revenue of $190 billion to $200 billion, per two people familiar with the financials cited by Reuters. That’s structurally similar to the 2029 projections stretched into SpaceX’s June pitch, and to Cerebras Systems’ pre-IPO framing. One FT-quoted investor pegged growth at 800% and a “low-end” 30x multiple, implying $3 trillion. For comparison, LSEG data puts SpaceX and Cloudflare at 41.6x forward revenue; the Nasdaq 100 averages 34 times trailing and 25 times forward earnings. At $2 trillion, Fortune notes Anthropic would need roughly $59 billion to $79 billion in annual profits to match.

CFO Krishna Rao is selling premium pricing, with Anthropic’s top model priced more than 2.5 times higher than OpenAI’s flagship. Enterprise seats over $1 million a year went from 500 at the Series G close to 1,000 a few weeks later, per Ramp and Artificial Analysis data. Contracts with the Commerce and Defense Departments, and reported $6 billion talks to acquire Decart AI, fill in the growth story.

OpenAI is expected to list in 2027. Anthropic is going first because it can, and because a $2 trillion print in October sets the ceiling everyone else will be measured against.

Sources