Anthropic's IPO Valuation Pegged at $2 Trillion: Can It Really Crush SpaceX?

TradingKey - On August 13, market rumors swirled that artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, fueled by rapidly climbing revenue, could see its valuation more than double from current levels to $2 trillion or even higher. If so, it would mean Anthropic surpassing SpaceX to set the record for the largest initial public offering in history. However, how likely is this scenario?

How Are Anthropic and SpaceX Different?

Anthropic and SpaceX represent two of the hottest and most iconic types of companies in today's tech sector: the former is a quintessential software/generative AI giant, while the latter is a heavy-asset/hard-tech and aerospace powerhouse, as detailed below:

Why Anthropic Dares to Target a $2 Trillion Valuation

The market's willingness to give Anthropic such a lofty valuation rests primarily on three core pillars of strength and financial backing, the strongest of which is its exponential revenue surge. Anthropic's annualized revenue stood at approximately $20 billion at the beginning of 2026 and rose to $47 billion in May, with investors projecting its ARR to double and surge to $100 billion–$120 billion by the end of 2026. Based on an estimated $100 billion revenue by the end of 2026, a $2 trillion valuation implies a forward price-to-sales ratio of just 20x, lower than popular AI peers like Palantir and Nebius, which easily trade at P/S multiples of over 50x.

Anthropic's value support comes from its monetization moat in B2B enterprise solutions and Claude Code. Unlike some AI vendors that rely on consumer traffic, Anthropic possesses a highly lucrative business structure. Enterprise clients exhibit high retention rates and strong loyalty, with billing mostly usage-based—meaning revenue scales automatically as companies embed AI into internal workflows. Furthermore, in the fields of code generation and AI agents, Claude demonstrates an overwhelming edge, substantially boosting developer paid conversion rates and API call volume.

Best of all, Anthropic has obtained massive capital and computing power support from tech and chip giants such as Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), and SK Hynix (SKHY); moreover, with the primary market already hitting a ceiling of $965 billion, doubling its valuation to $2 trillion upon listing follows the common logic of public markets absorbing primary market premiums.

Why Anthropic’s Valuation Struggles to Surpass SpaceX

SpaceX's historic IPO valuation of approximately $1.77 trillion was not achieved solely through the "aerospace" concept, but rather by successfully building a conglomerate empire of "heavy physical infrastructure + global telecommunications + defense concessions + orbital AI computing power." By contrast, although Anthropic has seen its revenue surge exponentially thanks to the outstanding performance of its Claude model series, it still faces several key hurdles to surpass SpaceX in terms of valuation scale.

Anthropic operates in the pure software and large language model space. Although technically advanced, it faces intense pressure from tech giants such as OpenAI, Google (Gemini), Meta (Llama), and SpaceX (xAI). More notably, the iteration cycle for AI models is extremely short, meaning a single model's competitive edge can easily be diluted by open-source technology or updates from competitors.

Although Anthropic has demonstrated impressive growth in its annualized revenue run rate, pure software AI models are currently still squeezed by massive compute costs, requiring extremely high expenditures for GPU and cloud computing power. Much of Anthropic's enterprise revenue is distributed through partners such as AWS or Google Cloud. While using gross accounting methods makes its reported revenue appear exceptionally high, its net revenue after cloud revenue-sharing deductions and its actual retained gross profit will face a certain discount.

As mentioned above, the valuations of AI software companies rely on high P/S multiples and exponential growth expectations. However, as AI models gradually move toward falling marginal costs and API price wars, the market will tend to assign more reasonable valuation multiples, which also means that Anthropic's valuation multiple may fail to reach 20.