Anthropic expects its initial public offering (IPO) to match or exceed the size of SpaceX’s record-setting share sale and could file publicly as soon as the end of August, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. The report says the company is still running the numbers, and that the size and other details could change.
For a crypto audience, the news is notable less for the milestone itself than for how far ahead of it the digital-asset market has already run: for weeks, traders have been putting real money on Anthropic’s eventual valuation through pre-IPO derivatives listed on crypto exchanges, and the AI company’s build-out has become one of the largest sources of new demand for crypto-mining infrastructure.
The SpaceX benchmark
SpaceX set the bar Anthropic is now aiming at. Elon Musk’s rocket company raised $75 billion in its offering, a figure that climbed to $86.2 billion once the overallotment option was exercised, in what Bloomberg’s data calls the largest first-time share sale ever, valuing SpaceX near $1.77 trillion. Matching or beating that would require Anthropic to sell tens of billions of dollars in stock and would rank among the biggest IPOs in history; a listing on that scale would also push 2026 to the highest annual U.S. IPO volume on record.
Anthropic confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on June 1 and is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. It is also weighing super-voting shares that would keep control with CEO Dario Amodei, who is reported to hold about a 2% stake, and his co-founders, and is expected to go public ahead of rival OpenAI, which has pushed its own listing to 2027. Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao has declined to commit to a valuation figure in recent investor briefings, Bloomberg reported.
The numbers behind the ambition
Anthropic’s revenue trajectory is the engine of the optimism. Its annualized revenue run rate reached roughly $65 billion by late July, up from around $10 billion across all of 2025, with second-quarter revenue reported near $11.5 billion against $787 million a year earlier. The company’s private valuation has climbed steeply as well, from about $61.5 billion in early 2025 to $965 billion at its $65 billion funding round in May 2026.
Those figures come with an important caveat: the company posted a net loss of roughly $42 billion in 2025, driven by enormous computing costs, and because its S-1 remains confidential, its audited financials, share count and governance terms are not yet independently verifiable. Every valuation number in circulation is either a private-round disclosure or a projection.
How crypto markets are already trading it
The clearest crypto connection is the most direct one: traders on crypto exchanges have been pricing Anthropic in real time. Binance Futures lists an ANTHROPICUSDT “pre-IPO perpetual”, a leveraged derivative launched on June 2 that lets traders speculate on the company’s valuation before any listing. In mid-August, the Binance contract implied a valuation of roughly $1.6 trillion at the exchange’s one-billion-share reference count, after climbing steadily over prior weeks.
Binance is no longer alone. Anthropic pre-IPO perpetuals now trade across several venues, both centralized and on-chain:
- Binance — ANTHROPICUSDT Pre-IPO Perp, launched June 2, up to 20x leverage, USDT-settled.
- Bybit — ANTHROPICUSDT (and OPENAIUSDT) Pre-IPO Perpetual Contracts, up to 20x leverage, USDT-settled.
- Bitget — ANTHROPICUSDT pre-IPO perpetual futures, also launched in early June.
- Crypto.com — Pre-IPO Perpetuals for Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX.
- Hyperliquid — an on-chain ANTHROPIC synthetic perpetual deployed by the Paradigm-incubated Ventuals protocol via Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, with up to 3x leverage.
Implied valuations differ from venue to venue, because each contract uses its own estimated share count and leverage cap and derives its mark price from its own order book rather than from any external appraisal. The centralized products (Binance, Bybit, Bitget, Crypto.com) offer up to 20x leverage and settle in USDT; the on-chain Ventuals market is a non-deliverable synthetic capped at 3x.
It is worth being precise about what these prices are, and are not. Each is a leveraged crypto derivative that trades around the clock; none represents ownership of Anthropic, and every issuer states that its product is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the company, that no S-1 has been made public, and that there is no guarantee an IPO will occur or that a contract will track the eventual listing price. The distinction matters: when Anthropic declared unauthorized share transfers through special-purpose vehicles and “tokenized securities” void in May, SPV-backed tokenized-share products reportedly fell 40–50%, while the synthetic perpetuals, which hold no actual shares , were left largely intact. The implied valuations they show are snapshots of speculative sentiment, not authoritative numbers.
That sentiment still sits below what some private investors expect. The Crypto Times previously noted that six Anthropic investors saw a potential IPO valuation near $2 trillion, with one arguing that roughly 800% annual growth could justify a figure closer to $3 trillion, projections resting on estimates that Anthropic’s run rate could reach $100–120 billion by the end of 2026. Alongside the perps, prediction-market platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi have offered contracts on whether and when the IPO will happen at all.
The infrastructure link, and the risk backdrop
The second crypto thread runs through the physical build-out. To feed its growth, Anthropic has been locking up computing capacity, including a 20-year, roughly $9.1 billion arrangement with Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms to lease AI data-center capacity, part of a broader trend of crypto miners repurposing operations into AI hosting, a shift that has re-rated several mining stocks this year. In that sense, Anthropic’s demand curve now flows directly into the balance sheets of companies that came up in crypto.
The listing also lands in a risk-on tape: Bitcoin traded around $75,000 this week, and research houses including ARK have framed surging AI revenue as a force being reflected across crypto and AI-linked markets. That linkage cuts both ways. A record-breaking AI IPO would validate the “AI supercycle” narrative that has lifted crypto-adjacent equities and tokens, but the same enthusiasm has revived debate over whether AI valuations, and the risk appetite spilling into crypto, have run ahead of fundamentals. Anthropic’s $42 billion loss and the leverage baked into pre-IPO perps are reminders that the downside is as real as the upside.
The bottom line
The Bloomberg report confirms the scale of Anthropic’s ambition, not the outcome: the size could change, the valuation is unset, and the filing is not yet public. What is already concrete is that crypto markets have not waited for the paperwork; they have spent weeks pricing one of the year’s biggest listings through leveraged contracts, prediction markets and the infrastructure deals underpinning the AI boom. This article makes no prediction about Anthropic’s eventual valuation and is not investment advice.
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