Anthropic Stock Forecast: Valuation, IPO Timing and Scenarios

An Anthropic forecast is not a price forecast at the moment, it is a valuation forecast. Because no share price exists, all we can do is estimate which company value the IPO is likely to ask for and which revenue would have to carry that value.

The timetable is the first question, and since 26 October it has a hard basis. On 1 June 2026 Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC and announced this itself. Confidential means that the regulator reviews the document and the public sees nothing. Only the public version shows the figures and the ticker, and later the price range and the number of shares.

Since 26 October the prospectus is public. Anthropic filed the S-1 in the SEC's EDGAR register and announced the filing itself. It has applied to list its Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. The fields for the price range, the number of shares offered and the date are still blank. I had searched the register without a match on 8 and 29 September and on 6 and 25 October. On 26 October the full-text search for "Anthropic, PBC" finds the filing with its exhibits. Anyone who names a date or a price range today is still passing off a guess as a number.

The reports from the drafts have been confirmed. On 28 September Reuters reported exclusively from the confidential draft prospectus. It contains full-year figures for 2025 for the first time; they follow in the valuation section below. About a third of the document describes risks. On 20 October a second report followed from a newer version, this time with the figures for the first half of 2026. The core figures of both reports are in the public prospectus as reported. One figure differs, the second-quarter profit, more on that below. The full-year figures for 2023 to 2025 are audited, the figures for 2026 are not.

Since then the timetable has slipped. In early September the expectation was a public prospectus at the end of September and a listing in October. On 18 September the Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic was now aiming for November, so it can show its third-quarter figures before the roadshow. On 1 October Bloomberg became more specific: marketing could begin in the week of 9 November, which would put the first listing before Thanksgiving on 26 November. On 21 October, according to media reports, the prospectus could go public as early as Friday, 23 October. It came one trading day later, on Monday, 26 October. Anthropic does not name a date for the first listing in the prospectus either.

From this you can work out a date that you can check yourself. A company that files its prospectus confidentially must, under an SEC rule, make it public at least 15 days before the roadshow, or before the requested effective date if there is no roadshow. Anthropic filed on Monday, 26 October. The formal roadshow can therefore start on Tuesday, 10 November, at the earliest, one day after the start of the week of 9 November that Bloomberg had named. Early investor meetings are not necessarily the roadshow. Reports point to a first listing in mid-November. According to Investing.com, Fox Business reporter Liz Claman, citing sources, named 19 or 20 November. For comparison: at SpaceX, exactly 23 days passed between the public prospectus on 20 May 2026 and the first listing on 12 June.

The banks have been at work for a long time. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley come first on the cover of the prospectus, followed by JPMorgan and 19 other banks. They have been arranging investor meetings since July. On 14 October the investor day followed at the headquarters in San Francisco, with chief executive Dario Amodei and finance chief Krishna Rao. A formal start of the roadshow has not been confirmed, and the date depends on exactly that.

The ticker is now fixed, at least as an application. Anthropic has applied to list under ANT. The symbol ANTP that went around in forums is therefore out of date. The prospectus does not name an ISIN or a German WKN. How to get exposure before the IPO and how to buy once the stock is listed is explained in our guide to Anthropic stock.

The revenue run-rate is the only figure that really moves. The graphic above shows its five steps. At the end of 2025 it stood at about $9 billion, in April 2026 at over 30, in May at 47 and at the end of July at over $65 billion. That is more than a sevenfold increase in seven months. The figure for the end of the year, by contrast, is an expectation and not a report.

These valuation marks replace the price levels that do not exist yet. $2 trillion is the reported IPO target and would be the largest IPO in history. $1.5 trillion is the lower view that some investors have weighed since the quarterly figures, according to Reuters, about one and a half times the last funding round. $1 trillion is the lower end of that range, just above the private valuation from May. $965 billion is the last confirmed valuation, from the funding round of May 2026, post-money. $183 billion was the valuation of September 2025: in eight months it has more than quintupled.

Everything starts with a figure that is easy to misread. The run-rate is a projection. According to the prospectus, Anthropic takes its usage-based revenue of the last 28 days times 13 and its monthly subscription revenue times twelve, in essence recent revenue scaled up to a year. It is not an audited annual revenue, and the prospectus itself warns that its growth rate is likely to fall. As long as revenue keeps rising, the run-rate keeps rising too. If revenue grows more slowly, the run-rate rises more slowly, and exactly that fast rise is already priced into the valuations. If the revenue level itself falls, the run-rate falls with it.

With that caveat, the calculation gets uncomfortable. Measured against the run-rate of $65 billion, the last private valuation of $965 billion equals about 15 times revenue. At a hypothetical $2 trillion offer valuation, it would be about 31 times. Buyers on the exchange could pay a different valuation, as the SpaceX example below shows.

Since the investor day there is a second basis for the calculation. In the third quarter Anthropic had revenue of $16.8 billion, according to media reports, about $67 billion when scaled up to a year. Measured against that, $2 trillion equals about 30 times revenue and $1.5 trillion about 22 times. A projection from one quarter is less sensitive than one from a single month, but it is still a projection.

Against the expectation for the end of the year it looks friendlier. Investors expect a run-rate of $100 to $120 billion by the end of the year, and the WSJ most recently named over $110 billion. Taking the middle, the price-to-sales ratio falls to about 9 at a $1 trillion valuation, about 14 at $1.5 trillion and about 18 at $2 trillion. These figures assume that the expectation comes true.

Against the company's own planning it almost looks cheap. Internal documents assume annual revenue of $190 to $200 billion for 2028. Even a $2 trillion valuation would only be about 10 times that. Anyone who considers the stock cheap at this price is also buying a tripling of revenue within two years.

A comparison on the same basis makes the size easier to grasp. SpaceX was worth about $2.00 trillion at the weekly close of 23 October. Its third-quarter revenue of $14.58 billion scaled up to a year comes to about $58 billion, so the valuation is about 34 times that figure. On the same basis, third quarter times four, Anthropic at a hypothetical $2 trillion would be about 30 times. This does not say which IPO is cheaper: SpaceX has a market price, Anthropic an expectation, and the two businesses grow in completely different ways. How to read such a valuation ratio always depends on the growth behind it.

That growth is the real reason for the numbers. In the second quarter of 2026 revenue was $11.56 billion according to the prospectus, after $4.73 billion in the first quarter and $787 million in the same quarter a year earlier. That is almost 15 times within a year. At the operating level Anthropic made money for the first time in that quarter: $974 million under US accounting rules (GAAP). Adjusted for stock-based compensation for employees, it was $2.24 billion. Over the first half as a whole there is still an operating loss of $693 million, and none of this is a net profit.

The third-quarter figures came at the investor day. Revenue rose to $16.8 billion, according to CNBC, Reuters and the Financial Times, 45 percent more than the about $11.6 billion of the second quarter. Anthropic said the quarter was in the black on an adjusted basis. According to the Financial Times it also reported a positive cash flow. Separately it gave a ratio: $1.70 of revenue for every dollar spent on computing power. How large the third-quarter profit was has not been reported, and the prospectus still leaves the third-quarter fields blank. Which adjustments Anthropic used for the third quarter is not known; for the second quarter the prospectus shows that the adjusted figure adds back stock-based compensation. The pace is slowing, though. From the first to the second quarter revenue had more than doubled, and that is exactly what disappointed some investors, according to Reuters. Since then some of them have weighed a valuation of about $1.5 trillion instead of $2 trillion. One long-time investor expects a valuation at the issue price of about $1.8 trillion, according to Fortune.

For 2025 there are now audited figures. According to the prospectus, revenue in 2025 rose to $4.59 billion, almost twelve times the $386 million of the year before. In the same year Anthropic made an operating loss of $8.06 billion. The costs for computing power and infrastructure alone tripled to $7.33 billion, more than half of all operating costs of $12.65 billion.

Most of the net loss of almost $42 billion is an accounting entry. About $34 billion of it comes from financing instruments that can later be converted into shares. Because Anthropic has become more valuable, their estimated value rose too, and this rise is booked as an expense. No cash left the company for it. At the end of 2025 Anthropic held $20.28 billion in cash and liquid assets.

In the first half of 2026 the pattern repeats on a larger scale. The prospectus shows a net loss of $80.7 billion, after $13 billion a year earlier. Reuters and the Wall Street Journal had reported the figure from a draft on 20 October. $72.4 billion of it is the same kind of accounting entry, because the convertible notes gained value with the valuation. Revenue was $16.29 billion, after $1.16 billion a year earlier. Anthropic spent $8.95 billion on computing power and infrastructure, after $2.33 billion a year earlier. Unlike in 2025, cash flowed in from operations: $3.93 billion in the half year. At the end of June, after the large funding round, Anthropic held $131.7 billion in cash and liquid assets.

Two other figures weigh more heavily. Reuters had reported $518 billion of planned spending on cloud, data centres and infrastructure from the draft. In the public prospectus the field for the total is still blank, but it names commitments that run until 2045. And almost a quarter of revenue in 2025 came from just two customers, with 12 percent each. In the first nine months of 2026, according to the prospectus, no single customer was above 10 percent, and the five largest together made up about 25 percent. According to the risk section, many large customers have no long-term contracts and can cut their spending at any time. Long-term costs therefore meet revenue that can fall away at short notice.

These figures come with a caveat. In the prospectus only the full-year figures for 2023 to 2025 are audited. The half-year and quarterly figures for 2026 are unaudited, and the third-quarter figures still come only from accounts of people at the investor day. The prospectus is a preliminary version and can still change before the price is set.

Two scenarios, clearly separated. No price targets, because there is no price. Only the logic behind the two paths.

I am watching these drivers as I keep this analysis up to date. They decide whether the valuation turns into a share price that holds.

The price range is the next hard signal. The prospectus has been public since 26 October, but the fields for the price range and the number of shares are still blank. Anthropic fills them with an amendment to the prospectus. Only then can the valuation be turned into a price per share. The roadshow can start on 10 November at the earliest.

The third-quarter figures are known, but only from people who were there. $16.8 billion of revenue and another adjusted profit support the price range. The slower growth weighs on it. In the public prospectus the third-quarter fields are still blank, so the figures are only documented once Anthropic adds them there.

The growth pace shows whether the valuations hold. From the first to the second quarter revenue more than doubled, from the second to the third it rose by 45 percent. For the end of the year investors expect a run-rate of $110 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. If the pace holds, the reported valuations are easier to defend. If it flattens further, they are not.

The cost of computing power can eat the margin in a single quarter. In 2025 it tripled to $7.33 billion, and in the first half of 2026 alone it was $8.95 billion, according to the prospectus. The operating profit of $974 million in the second quarter is a little over 8 percent of $11.56 billion of revenue, and rising data centre costs can wipe it out.

The interest rate path is the biggest factor outside the business. A valuation that rests on profits far in the future loses the most when interest rates rise. Our US interest rate forecast follows the Fed and Treasury yields.

Competition is both an opportunity and a yardstick. OpenAI does not expect its own listing before 2027, as our OpenAI stock forecast explains. Until then, Anthropic would be the only pure AI model provider on the stock market.

The lock-up periods after the first listing matter early. At SpaceX, hundreds of millions of shares became tradable in tranches from August. At Anthropic, according to the prospectus, management and almost all existing shareholders are bound by lock-ups. For the co-founders and certain shareholders with more than 0.5 percent of the fully diluted shares before the offering, the lock-up ends on the second full trading day after the results for the third quarter of 2027, at the latest 365 days after the date of the prospectus. For the other bound holders the same applies after the results for the first quarter of 2027, at the latest 180 days after the date of the prospectus. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley can release shares early.

You can check this yourself. The prospectus is in the EDGAR register of the SEC and is free to read there. The agency's full-text search also finds every later amendment with the price range. Until the first listing, our other forecasts are the better place for tradable markets, because they have charts with levels you can read.

The most honest part of this forecast comes from our own archive. We followed the largest IPO in history so far from the first day and recorded the prices. What happened there is the best available answer to what could happen with Anthropic in the first weeks.

The figures in the order in which they came. The prospectus appeared on 20 May 2026. The first listing was on 12 June at an issue price of $135, and the first close was about $161. Four days later the all-time high stood at $225.64. After that the stock fell as low as $104.83. It ended the week to 23 October at $147.49; our SpaceX stock forecast follows the chart week by week.

Work through it once from a buyer's point of view. Anyone who got the issue price was 67 percent ahead after four days. Anyone who bought on the exchange on the first trading day paid about $161 and saw $104.83 a few weeks later. That is a loss of about 35 percent, at a company whose fundamentals had not changed in those weeks.

The lesson is uncomfortable and simple. With an issue of this size, the first weeks are not decided by the business but by allocation, mood and lock-ups. At SpaceX more than $120 lay between high and low within two months. Anyone who buys without a plan is trading exactly this swing.

For Anthropic this means three things. First, the issue price is not the price a private investor gets. Second, a strong first day says nothing about the following eight weeks. Third, it pays to read the lock-up periods in the prospectus before entering any order at all.

There is no reliable Anthropic forecast for 2030. There is no price, no share count and only three audited financial years. What can be described is the range of possible developments.

Why no fixed price target? A price target needs a price and a number of shares. Both are missing. Anyone who names a figure for 2030 today multiplies one guess by a second guess. The only serious approach is to put the valuation into context.