SpaceX’s stock market flotation has dominated headlines lately, but attention is already turning to the next trillion-dollar candidate: AI giant Anthropic.
On the face of it, a $1 trillion Anthropic IPO looks like exactly the kind of number that screams “AI bubble”.
During a funding round in March 2025, Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion. By September, that figure had tripled to $183 billion. By February 2026, it had more than doubled again, to $380 billion. By May, even that seemed modest: investors were valuing the company at $965 billion, ahead of OpenAI at roughly $852 billion.
That’s a 15.7 times increase in valuation in little more than a year, and a $585 billion increase in just three months – larger than the combined value of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, to take two established American giants.
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Even some of those closest to the company are uneasy about the pace of the re-rating.
“I worked so hard to get people into Anthropic at a $5 billion valuation when nobody wanted to do it,” said Eric Ries, who advises Anthropic on governance, this week. “And then I had those same people begging me for the chance to get in at $500, $800, $1 trillion at any price. I’m reflexively sceptical any time people are willing to pay any price.”
However, it is difficult to know what is more striking about Anthropic: its meteoric ascent towards $1 trillion, or the fact it no longer looks obviously excessive.
Last month, Anthropic said its annualised revenue had risen to $47 billion, from roughly $5 billion at its September 2025 funding round – “more impressive revenue growth than any company in history”, as US economist Noah Smith noted recently.
Whereas SpaceX has been valued at over 90 times revenues, Anthropic’s valuation suggests it is trading on around 20 times sales – not cheap, but Smith suggests it’s relatively conservative for a company still growing at about 130 per cent a quarter.
The question, then, is not whether the valuation is large, but how long the underlying growth can justify it.
