Anthropic forecasts $200 billion in revenue by 2028

Bankers and investors are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on these projections. The application of revenue multiples is a common practice for fast-growing software companies that have not yet reached a mature profit profile. However, looking two years ahead is less typical, reflecting the rapid expansion of Anthropic's business and the difficulties in setting benchmarks for a company that continues to heavily invest in developing its artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Valuation Challenges

The pace of spending on AI investments has caused a decline in many popular tech stocks in recent months, including some firms comparable to Anthropic. Previously, among the fastest-growing companies to go public, there were instances where investors referenced expected revenue by 2028 during IPO preparation, such as with Cerebras Systems, and SpaceX's forecasts extended to 2029 before its June public offering at a record valuation.

This approach reflects the difficulty in valuing an AI company whose margins are still under pressure from massive costs associated with computational power, model training, and hiring personnel. Investors are betting that as Anthropic grows, its revenue will increase faster than the costs required to support that growth, allowing margins to expand.

For benchmarking Anthropic ahead of analyst day, public companies such as the cloud infrastructure firm Cloudflare, the enterprise software company Palantir, and Elon Musk's SpaceX are being considered. Public comparables are a critical part of the valuation process during an IPO, as they provide investors with a baseline for assessing companies with similar business models and growth profiles. The group of companies also helps determine which revenue or profit multiples should be applied to the company's financial forecasts.

Palantir is valued at 53 times its expected revenue this year, making it one of the most expensive stocks on Wall Street. LSEG data shows that SpaceX and Cloudflare trade at a multiple of 41.6x expected revenue for 2026. Each of these companies offers a different perspective on Anthropic: Palantir serves as a benchmark for valuing a fast-growing, AI-involved business; Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company; and SpaceX demonstrates an example of a company valued partly on future scale expectations rather than current financial standing.

Traditionally established companies are valued more heavily on profit or EBITDA, giving investors insight into the business economics. However, for Anthropic, current EBITDA does not fully reflect the economics investors expect to see upon scaling. The company spends huge sums on GPUs and other computing power, model training, inference, and hiring. These expenses are necessary to support rapid expansion but may constitute a smaller share of revenue as the business grows.

The company's financial trajectory already shows how quickly this equation is changing. According to the company itself, Anthropic's revenue pace was around $9 billion at the end of 2025 before growing to over $47 billion by May. Anthropic projected revenue of no less than $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, aligning with plans for first-quarter operating profit of $559 million.

Performance

The company stated that its revenue growth rate increased by more than tenfold annually over each of the three years leading up to 2026. This growth is the key reason why investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple. Thus, the valuation depends on the assumption that Anthropic's current expenditures are funding a business that will ultimately generate much higher revenue and margins. It is expected that training and inference will become more efficient as technologies improve, and personnel and other operating costs will represent a smaller share of revenue as the company scales.

"Can they reach a valuation of $2 trillion? Yes, they can, and I'm just curious if it will remain so over time," noted David Merkel, senior partner at investment firm Aleph Investments. "Does AI truly produce that much additional productivity... These are just questions we need to ask if we are thinking about pricing this, buying this."