Anthropic's revenue just topped $65 Billion. So did its last funding round. That's a coincidence.

Two unrelated numbers, two months apart and they end up at the same number. Earlier in May, Anthropic closed its Series H round with $65 billion. Its annualized revenue run rate surpassed $65 billion by the end of July, compared with $47 billion in May and just $9 billion at the end of last year.

Neither number caused the other. Together, they coincidentally align as well, and are doing something much odder: reshaping the way bankers gauge each new AI firm's valuation at IPO.

The climb itself is the story

$9 billion at the end of 2025. $47 billion by May. $65 billion by late July. Anthropic itself confirmed the May number in its own funding announcement, writing: "our run-rate revenue has crossed $47 billion this month alone."

The Financial Times said that investors now expect the company to finish 2026 between $100 billion and $120 billion. OpenAI has quickly morphed as well, doubling up its own run rate over a similar stretch from $20 billion to $40 billion, but it's still lagging well behind.

First to list is first in the rulebook

The gap is important, because the first of these companies to hit the public markets will likely determine the benchmark by which the second will be valued. Both firms have reportedly been told as much directly by bankers. Anthropic seems poised to surpass that record first and exceed a $2 trillion valuation; the largest IPO ever.

The figure supporting that valuation has yet to be fulfilled

It is not the target size that is actually unusual. It's what it's built on. At least $190 billion to $200 billion of revenue by 2028, two full years out, Anthropic has communicated to bankers working on the IPO.

That represents about five times its projected future revenue relative to its $965 billion Series H valuation, not what the company currently makes. Palantir now trades at about 53 times its projected sales. SpaceX and Cloudflare have similar valuations: 41.6 times some numbers from 2026.

Those all look comparatively rich next to Anthropic's own multiple. It's just conservative against a number that does not yet exist.

None of this, however, stopped bankers from going ahead and making the bet anyway

In hindsight, this IPO is a bargain if Anthropic does actually achieve $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028. If it comes up truly short, public investors will have bought into a company based on promise rather than performance, and every AI company that follows Anthropic to market will point to the exact same justification.

For now the demand behind that number is real. Ramp's AI Index, published in July, puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI on US business adoption, 43.5% of US companies paying for it compared with 39.7% using OpenAI, and the same quarter saw Anthropic record a positive operating income while OpenAI is expected to lose around $14 billion this year.

And that is a fundamentally different place to be going public from. The question the rest of the market is about to start asking, too: Is it different enough to price two years into the future?

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