Anthropic is telling investors it intends to match or exceed the $86.2 billion SpaceX pulled in with its record-setting IPO, according to Bloomberg reporting on Wednesday, August 20 that cites people familiar with the matter. The S-1 could file publicly as soon as the end of this month.

The reference class is deliberate. SpaceX raised $75 billion at the outset, the biggest first-time share sale ever, before the overallotment took it to $86.2 billion, and the company now sits at a $1.77 trillion market cap. That, as Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle framed it, is the number to beat for the market-cap crown. Anthropic’s last private mark, set in May, was $965 billion. CFO Krishna Rao has declined to name a target valuation in investor briefings, which is itself the tell: you don’t anchor when you think the book will do it for you.

The growth curve is the pitch. Preliminary second-quarter revenue came in at $11.5 billion against $787 million in the same quarter a year earlier. The annualized run rate hit $65 billion by end of July.

The losses are the asterisk. Anthropic posted a net loss of nearly $42 billion in 2025, up from $8.3 billion the year before, most of it compute. A $1.25 billion-per-month deal with SpaceX itself, for capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, runs through May 2029. The counterparty on the bill is also the benchmark on the tape.

Citigroup is muscling into the syndicate alongside Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan, and the revolving credit facility is targeted above roughly $10 billion. The staging matters because it puts Dario Amodei’s company on the tape ahead of Sam Altman’s, with OpenAI now eyeing 2027 while Altman reportedly holds out for a $1 trillion valuation of his own.

The last time a private company priced this aggressively into a public book was SpaceX itself, a few months ago. The template is fresh, the underwriters remember the mechanics, and Anthropic is quoting it back at them.

Sources