TL;DR
Anthropic is telling investors to expect between $190bn and $200bn of revenue in 2028, a projection Reuters reports has not surfaced publicly before. Bankers preparing what could be one of the largest listings on record are applying enterprise value-to-revenue multiples against that forecast rather than pricing off current performance. Palantir, Cloudflare and SpaceX are being used as reference points.
Pricing two years into the future
Revenue multiples are standard for fast-growing software businesses without a settled profit profile. Reaching two years out is not. Sources describe the approach as a response to both the speed of the company’s expansion and the difficulty of benchmarking a business still pouring money into infrastructure.
The growth curve explains the confidence. Anthropic’s run rate sat near $9bn at the close of 2025 and passed $47bn by May. Second-quarter guidance for 2026 stands at $10.9bn or better, over twice the preceding three months, and the company expects to book a quarterly operating profit for the first time at $559m. It says the run rate has multiplied more than tenfold each year for three years.
The comparators do a lot of work
Palantir trades at 53 times expected revenue for this year, among the richest multiples on the US market. Cloudflare and SpaceX both sit at 41.6 times 2026 expectations, per LSEG. Each stands in for a different argument: Palantir for rapid growth with AI exposure, Cloudflare for infrastructure software, SpaceX for a company priced on future scale rather than present accounts.
David Merkel of Aleph Investments allows that a $2 trillion valuation is achievable while questioning whether it holds — and whether the productivity gains being assumed actually materialise.
What this means for UK buyers
British enterprises signing multi-year Claude commitments are, whether they frame it that way or not, taking a position on their supplier’s funding model. A vendor priced on 2028 assumptions carries a specific risk: if growth undershoots, the pressure to raise prices or reprioritise toward the largest accounts lands on customers. Procurement teams should be reading exit clauses and portability terms with that in mind, not just current rate cards.
Looking forward
The number to watch is not the headline valuation but whether margins actually expand as promised. The entire case rests on compute and training costs shrinking as a share of revenue while the business scales — a bet on efficiency improvements that have not happened yet.