Key points
- Anthropic could publicly file for an IPO as soon as the end of August, aiming to match or top SpaceX's $86.2 billion record raise, Bloomberg reported Aug. 20, 2026.
- Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion in July, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, and the company posted positive adjusted operating income last quarter.
- Investors are floating a $2 trillion valuation for an October listing, more than double the $965 billion price tag Anthropic set in May.
- Anthropic's new AI-text watermark, rolled out Aug. 11, drew public cancellations, though Anthropic says it hasn't seen a rise in cancellations overall.
Bloomberg reported on Aug. 20, 2026, that Anthropic may make its IPO filing public by the end of August. The company is considering an offering large enough to equal or top the record raise set by SpaceX (SPCX). For a potential October market debut, investors have floated a $2 trillion valuation, more than double the $965 billion figure Anthropic established in May.
Anthropic confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, and is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on the offering, though other banks could still be added before it prices. SpaceX priced its own Nasdaq debut at $135 a share for a $75 billion raise in June, a total that grew to $86.2 billion once underwriters exercised their overallotment option, the largest first-time share sale in history. If Anthropic reaches its target, the record for the biggest IPO ever would change hands twice in the same year.
Revenue that outpaces the story
Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion in July, according to figures the company shared with investors. That is up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, and the company disclosed preliminary second-quarter revenue above $11.5 billion, compared with $787 million in the same quarter a year earlier.
| Period | Annualized revenue |
|---|---|
| End of 2025 | $9 billion |
| April 2026 | $30 billion |
| May 2026 | $47 billion |
| July 2026 | $65 billion |
| Backers' year-end estimate | $100 billion to $120 billion |
Anthropic posted positive adjusted operating income for the quarter, the company's first, even as its full-year 2025 net loss came in near $42 billion, up from about $8.3 billion in 2024. The company is also seeking a revolving credit facility larger than the $10 billion it initially asked lenders for.
On a run-rate basis, Anthropic now leads rival OpenAI, whose annualized revenue stood near $40 billion, though the two companies may not calculate the figure the same way. OpenAI has also filed confidentially for its own IPO but pushed its listing target to 2027, which would put Anthropic on the public market first. Anthropic is reportedly considering a dual-class share structure that would give co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei and his fellow founders outsized voting control, similar to the arrangement that left Elon Musk with more than 82% voting control after SpaceX's own listing.
Who has a stake
Amazon (AMZN) has put about $8 billion into Anthropic and committed to invest up to $20 billion more, a position public filings suggest could be worth well over $100 billion at Anthropic's current valuation. Alphabet (GOOGL) holds about 14% of the company after investing at least $13 billion, and it agreed last month to put in up to $40 billion more, a stake contractually capped at 15% with no board seat or voting rights attached. Microsoft (MSFT) and Nvidia (NVDA) joined the cap table in November 2025, committing up to $5 billion and $10 billion respectively. Anthropic's $65 billion Series H in May, which set the $965 billion valuation, was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.
Investors are now floating a valuation of $2 trillion or more for the fall listing. One investor told the Financial Times, "If Anthropic is growing 800 per cent a year, you'd think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue]," a multiple that implies a valuation closer to $3 trillion. Not everyone agrees the number holds up. "Whenever there is speculation, there's also usually substance and fundamentals. The question here is whether the price investors are going to end up paying is going to match up to the substance and fundamentals of what AI is really going to do in the real economy and as a business," said Patrick Corrigan, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame.
A watermark backlash lands the same week
Anthropic announced Aug. 11, 2026 that it would embed machine-readable watermarks in text Claude generates, to comply with the European Union's AI Act after signing the bloc's Code of Practice on Transparency in July. The watermark is applied at the model level, so it travels across the API, Claude.ai, Claude Code and every other Claude surface, and uses a method based on Google DeepMind's SynthID-Text approach that shifts which words the model picks rather than altering the finished text afterward.
The announcement drew immediate pushback on X and Reddit. Math and AI commentator John Ennis posted a screenshot of his own cancellation, calling it "a ridiculous watermark idea." Business Insider identified four paying Claude Max subscribers who said they canceled over the watermark, and a developer in France published a GitHub tool built to strip it out. The complaints center on the watermark surviving copy and paste and sometimes persisting even when Claude only proofread or translated a user's own writing, which professionals in software, policy and technical writing said could get original work mistaken for AI-generated text.
Anthropic told Business Insider, "there hasn't been an increase [in cancellations] since watermarking was announced." Its revenue kept climbing through the same window, not slowing down, per the run-rate figures above. No reporting so far has connected the watermark backlash to the timing of the IPO filing, and Anthropic's own account of its subscriber numbers argues against it.
Sources
This story is based on Bloomberg's Aug. 20, 2026 report, "Anthropic Expects to Match SpaceX's Record IPO Size or Top It" (paywalled), corroborated by Yahoo Finance's summary. Revenue figures come from Bloomberg's Aug. 17, 2026 report on Anthropic's run rate, corroborated by CNBC and Axios. Valuation and investor commentary come from the Financial Times, via PYMNTS, and Fortune. SpaceX IPO details come from CNBC's June 2026 coverage. Investor stakes are sourced to Fortune's reporting on Amazon and Google's Anthropic holdings. Watermark details come from Anthropic's own announcement and TechCrunch's coverage; the cancellation reaction is sourced to SBS and Gizmodo, both citing Business Insider's reporting.
