When I wrote about Anthropic's IPO last week, I used a reference point of $19 billion ARR and forecast a median first-day market cap of $560 billion (range of $320 billion to $873 billion). A week later, Anthropic announced their revenue run rate had grown from $19 billion to $30 billion in less than two months. I re-did my forecast this morning with this new evidence, and I think their IPO valuation will be about 15% higher.
My median first-day market cap is now $643 billion. But I also give a significantly higher upside, with my 90th percentile forecast almost 20% higher, to $1.04 trillion. The downside (10th percentile) is essentially unchanged at around $330 billion.
On the one hand, this is a huge update, I legitimately think Anthropic is worth at least $100 billion more than I did last week. On the other hand, my updated forecast could be read as conservative, as I am still forecasting growth that is somewhat anchored to how companies have grown revenue in the past. In the age of AI, how much credence should we give to ridiculously outsized growth, with products that automate (and then improve on) whole categories of work in mere months?
In our OpenAI revenue forecast last year, we sketched how continuing the trend over the last four decades of the fastest time for companies to grow $1B→$100B could actually imply a company could grow from ~$10B in 2025 to ~ $100B by 2027, faster than any other company in history. Then we asked whether OpenAI could achieve that. Now, it looks like Anthropic is the company that will do this, not OpenAI. (I did predict in January that 2026 would be the year of Anthropic.) The extrapolation is similar, but with Anthropic's revenue even steeper, given they hit their first billion in revenue much later than OpenAI.
Coming back to reality a bit, forecasting valuations as multiples of revenue means an extra $100 billion of market cap is warranted. In the original forecast, Anthropic's $380 billion private valuation implied about 20x on $19 billion ARR. My new forecast is a bit higher than 20, as the growth rate should now be higher than we expected.
All in all, the $30 billion run rate is a huge update, and incredibly validating for Anthropic that their recent meteoric growth isn't a flash-in-the-pan. This also makes me wonder if Anthropic will list earlier than I forecasted last week, because investor sentiment must be red hot right now, and it's always risky for them to bet that their growth will continue at this astounding rate.
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