Anthropic is preparing an offering that would match or exceed the $86.2 billion SpaceX raised at its debut, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg, with a public S-1 filing possible by the end of August. SpaceX raised $75 billion at pricing and $86.2 billion after the overallotment; clearing that bar would make 2026 the largest U.S. IPO year ever, surpassing the 2021 peak of $195.2 billion. Through August 19, newly listed companies had already raised $160.6 billion.

CFO Krishna Rao has been running the road-show math in recent investor briefings, and, per Bloomberg’s reporting, has declined to name a number. TechStartups pegs the target north of $2 trillion. That’s roughly double the $965 billion valuation set in May, when Anthropic raised $65 billion privately.

The financials Bloomberg reviewed explain the appetite. Preliminary Q2 revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, up roughly 14-fold from $787 million a year earlier, and Anthropic booked positive adjusted operating income for the quarter. Annualized run rate hit $65 billion by late July. The counterweight: a 2025 net loss of nearly $42 billion, roughly five times the $8.3 billion loss the year before.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are working the deal, per Quartz, alongside a revolving credit facility targeting roughly $10 billion. Anthropic is also weighing super-voting shares, which would entrench CEO Dario Amodei’s roughly 2 percent stake, an echo of the dual-class playbook Google normalized at its 2004 IPO and Facebook cemented in 2012.

The subtext of Rao’s silence on valuation is that any number he names becomes the floor. Better to let the S-1 do it.

Sources