Anthropic’s IPO would value it above Boeing and Goldman combined
A $2tn Anthropic listing would need Morgan Stanley and Goldman to price a company still burning cash.
By The Ledger · · 5 min read
Anthropic is close to picking Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as lead underwriters for an initial public offering that would value the company near $2 trillion. No paperwork has been filed. The number that matters is the one nobody can yet check: what Anthropic actually earns against what it spends.
A $2 trillion valuation would put a five-year-old company, founded in 2021, ahead of Berkshire Hathaway's $1.1 trillion market capitalization and roughly level with Alphabet. Anthropic's own revenue guidance, reported by multiple outlets tracking its fundraising rounds, sat near $5 billion annualized as of mid-2025. A price-to-sales ratio north of 300 is not unprecedented in AI investing, but it has never before been asked to survive public quarterly disclosure.
The banks get paid whether the stock holds or not
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, if confirmed as lead underwriters, collect a fee typically running 3 to 7 percent of proceeds raised, standard for large tech listings, according to underwriting data compiled by Renaissance Capital on past mega-IPOs. On an offering that could raise $10 billion to $20 billion — sums floated by people close to the process — that fee range translates to $300 million to $1.4 billion split among the bank syndicate. That fee is earned at pricing, not at any later share price. The banks' economic interest in the deal closing is not the same as an investor's interest in the deal performing.
The person who buys shares on the first trading day carries a different risk. Anthropic, unlike Google or Berkshire at their respective IPOs, is not yet profitable by its own disclosures to investors in prior funding rounds. The company has said publicly it expects break-even sometime after 2027. A retail investor buying at IPO price is underwriting two more years of losses at minimum, priced today as if they were already resolved.
Anthropic burns cash roughly as fast as it raises it
Anthropic's history is short but its cash needs are not. Founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei after they left OpenAI in 2021, the company built its business on selling access to its Claude models to enterprises and developers, charging per token processed. That model requires enormous, continuous spending on Nvidia and custom chips to run inference — the computation needed every time a user sends a prompt — a cost that scales with usage rather than shrinking with it, unlike traditional software.
The company raised roughly $13 billion across 2024 and 2025 in rounds backed by Google, Amazon and a consortium of venture firms, according to funding disclosures reported at the time. Each round priced the company higher: from roughly $18 billion in early 2024 to $61.5 billion by March 2025 to figures approaching $170 billion by mid-2025, per people familiar with the negotiations cited in financial press coverage. A $2 trillion IPO valuation would represent roughly a twelvefold jump from that mid-2025 private mark in under a year. Markets have rewarded steeper multiples before. They have rarely done so for a company still disclosing operating losses.
The catch nobody in the underwriting conversation is pricing
The $2 trillion figure assumes Anthropic's revenue growth continues at something close to its recent pace, doubling or tripling annually. That assumption depends on enterprise customers continuing to pay per-token fees for a service whose underlying cost — the compute needed to run each model — is falling industry-wide as chip efficiency improves and rival labs undercut on price. Google's Gemini and OpenAI's GPT models compete directly for the same enterprise contracts Anthropic needs to hit its growth targets. If the market commoditizes token pricing the way it commoditized cloud storage a decade ago, revenue growth slows exactly when public shareholders are demanding proof it won't.
There is also the matter of who is actually paying for the compute that generates that revenue. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all disclosed billions of dollars in "committed" cloud infrastructure spending tied to AI labs, some of it structured as credits rather than cash — meaning a portion of Anthropic's reported revenue may reflect vendor financing arrangements rather than independent customer demand. That distinction matters enormously to a public-market analyst modeling free cash flow, and it is the kind of detail that only surfaces once an S-1 filing forces disclosure.
The filing date is the only fact anyone can verify right now
Paperwork could appear as soon as next week, according to people briefed on the timeline, though IPO preparation schedules slip routinely — Instacart's 2023 filing moved by several weeks from initial guidance, as did Arm's. Until an S-1 is lodged with the Securities and Exchange Commission, every valuation figure attached to Anthropic is a private negotiation between the company and prospective underwriters, not a disclosed financial fact subject to audit.
The open question is whether public investors will value Anthropic on the same growth-first logic that private venture rounds used, or apply the profitability scrutiny that public markets have reserved for software companies since the 2022 rate-driven repricing of unprofitable tech stocks. That repricing cut valuations at companies like Snap and Peloton by 70 percent or more within a year of losing growth-investor patience. Anthropic's underwriters are betting the AI story is different enough to avoid that fate. The retail investor buying the IPO is the one who finds out if they're right.
Who actually bears the cost if the valuation doesn't hold
Early venture investors who bought at the $18 billion 2024 valuation are protected by paper gains already banked; a post-IPO decline mainly erodes value for anyone who buys at or above the $2 trillion opening mark. Employees holding options priced against private rounds face the same exposure, deferred until any lockup period — typically 180 days — expires and they can sell.
When would the shares actually become tradable
If paperwork is filed next week, a standard SEC review period runs six to ten weeks before a listing, based on comparable large-cap tech filings, putting a plausible trading date in the first quarter of next year, not before.