Anthropic is projecting annual revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion by 2028, according to a report citing people familiar with the company's finances.
The AI developer, known for its Claude models, is preparing for what could become one of the largest IPOs on record. Bankers and investors are looking further ahead than usual to price the company, using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts stretching two years into the future.
This approach helps investors judge how much of Anthropic's current $965 billion private valuation is justified by future growth rather than present earnings.
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The projected figure is more than four times Anthropic's $47 billion revenue run rate, which the company disclosed as recently as May. That run rate itself had grown sharply, rising from about $9 billion at the end of 2025.
Anthropic also projected at least $10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, along with its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million. Investors are betting that revenue will grow faster than the cost of GPUs, model training and inference over time, allowing profit margins to widen as the company scales.
Public companies like Cloudflare, Palantir and SpaceX are being used as valuation references ahead of Anthropic's analyst day, with Palantir currently trading at 53 times its expected 2026 revenue.
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Using far-out revenue forecasts to value a company before it goes public is not entirely new. Backers of Cerebras Systems pointed to 2028 revenue expectations ahead of that company's IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended out to 2029 before it went public at a record valuation in June.
Anthropic said its revenue run rate grew more than tenfold each year for the past three years leading into 2026, a pace that partly explains why investors are willing to look so far into the future. The company is yet to issue the $190 billion to $200 billion figure as official financial guidance, and it has not confirmed a final IPO valuation, timing, or pricing.
Until more detailed numbers become available, investors will need to weigh Anthropic's confirmed revenue growth against these unverified projections, along with the heavy costs involved in running frontier AI systems.