The number bankers are reportedly using to price Anthropic’s upcoming IPO isn’t its current revenue. It’s a forecast for revenue two and a half years from now — and that forecast has apparently grown enormously since it was last floated internally.
The Reuters Exclusive
According to a Reuters report citing two people familiar with Anthropic’s financials, bankers and investors evaluating Anthropic’s IPO are benchmarking the company’s valuation against an internal projection of $190-200 billion in 2028 revenue. For context, Anthropic’s current annualized run rate sits around $47 billion as of May 2026 — meaning the 2028 target implies roughly a 4x expansion in a little over two years.
That forecast is also a dramatic revision upward from what Anthropic was reportedly telling people internally as recently as November 2025, when the same 2028 revenue estimate was closer to $70 billion. Going from $70B to $190-200B in the span of about nine months is a striking jump, and it says as much about how fast the underlying business has been growing as it does about how aggressively Anthropic (and the bankers advising it) may be positioning the company ahead of a public offering.
To value the company against a number three years out rather than trailing or even current-year revenue, bankers are reportedly leaning on forward revenue multiples, using comparisons to companies like Cloudflare, Palantir, and SpaceX — businesses that, at various points, have also been valued heavily on future growth trajectories rather than present-day fundamentals.
The Broader IPO Context
This report lands against a backdrop that’s been building for months. Anthropic confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO in June 2026, not long after closing a $65 billion Series H round in late May 2026 that valued the company at roughly $965 billion — a figure that, at the time, put it ahead of rival OpenAI’s valuation. Anthropic’s revenue run rate has been on a genuinely steep climb: from around $9 billion at the end of 2025 to the ~$47 billion mark cited in this report by May 2026, alongside reports the company is on track for its first quarterly operating profit.
Anthropic and OpenAI have effectively been racing each other toward the public markets in 2026, and the scale of the numbers being discussed for Anthropic’s IPO — with some other reports referencing valuation targets well north of a trillion dollars — reflects both companies’ bet that the AI infrastructure buildout, and demand for frontier model access, isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
Why a 2028 Forecast, Specifically
Pricing a company off a forecast three fiscal years out is unusual — most IPOs lean on trailing twelve months or, at most, the current fiscal year’s guidance. Reuters’ sourcing suggests this reflects two things specific to Anthropic’s situation: the sheer velocity of its recent growth curve makes near-term numbers look almost quaint by comparison, and the company’s heavy, ongoing capital spending on AI infrastructure (compute, data centers, model training runs) means near-term profitability metrics don’t yet capture the business’s real earning power. Looking further out is one way to justify a valuation that current-year revenue alone can’t support.
It’s also worth being clear-eyed about what this kind of forecast represents: it’s Anthropic’s own internal projection, being used as an input to a valuation exercise ahead of a confidential filing. It is not an audited figure, not a guarantee, and — like every long-range revenue forecast from a fast-growing private company heading toward IPO — it should be read with the understanding that actual 2028 results could land meaningfully above or below it.
Verification
This is a Reuters exclusive, byline-dated effectively same-day as this report, citing two sources described as familiar with Anthropic’s financials. It was independently picked up by Yahoo Finance and other financial aggregators citing the same Reuters reporting within hours of publication. The surrounding context — the confidential June 2026 S-1 filing, the ~$965 billion Series H valuation, and an anticipated October 2026 IPO window — has been separately and consistently corroborated by Bloomberg and CNBC reporting, though as of this review neither outlet has independently confirmed the specific $190-200 billion figure itself. That leaves this as a strong single-primary-source story (Reuters) sitting inside a well-corroborated broader narrative.
What to Watch Next
The real test of this forecast will come as Anthropic’s confidential S-1 process moves toward an actual public filing, likely in the run-up to a fall 2026 IPO window. Watch for: whether other outlets independently confirm the $190-200B figure specifically, whether Anthropic’s quarterly revenue trajectory through the rest of 2026 tracks toward supporting a forecast of that scale, and how the eventual IPO pricing — whenever it lands — compares to both the $965B private valuation and whatever public-market multiple gets applied to this forward-looking revenue story.
Sources
- Anthropic’s IPO valuation hinges on $190-200 billion 2028 revenue forecast, sources say — Reuters
- Anthropic raises $65 billion, now valued at $965 billion — Reuters
- AI giant Anthropic confidentially files for US IPO — Reuters
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