Anthropic is preparing an IPO that its bankers expect to match or exceed the $75 billion SpaceX raised in its record share sale, a figure that ballooned to $86.2 billion once overallotments cleared. A public filing could land as soon as the end of August. Bloomberg reports investors are now underwriting a $2 trillion-or-higher valuation, twice the $1 trillion target the company was floating only months ago.

The bank roster is telling on its own. Citigroup has now joined Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase on the deal, which is roughly what happens when a first-time issuer is priced as a systemic event rather than a technology listing. It’s the same choreography that surrounded the 2014 Alibaba IPO: every desk in the room, because nobody wants to be the bank that wasn’t.

The fundamentals are doing unusual work here. Anthropic booked $11.5 billion in second-quarter revenue with positive adjusted operating income, and by late July its annualized run rate had hit $65 billion. A March analysis had it capturing more than 73% of first-time enterprise AI customers, against roughly 26% for OpenAI. Internal projections put 2028 revenue at $190 billion to $200 billion.

Then the other column. Anthropic’s 2025 net loss ran to about $42 billion, roughly five times the $8.3 billion it lost in 2024. A revolving credit facility is closing above $10 billion. A computing-capacity agreement with SpaceX, structured over three years, is worth tens of billions on its own, which means one leg of the IPO story is effectively financing the other.

CEO Dario Amodei, who holds about 2% of the company, and CFO Krishna Rao are pitching into a market that has already absorbed $160.6 billion in US IPO proceeds through 19 August, closing on the full-year record of $195.2 billion set in 2021. Claude reached around 245 million monthly users in June, per Statista. OpenAI’s own listing isn’t expected until 2027.

The tell isn’t the valuation. It’s that a company losing $42 billion a year is being underwritten as the safest bet on the tape.

Sources