Anthropic wants investors to believe its ‘total addressable market’ is worth $30 trillion—nearly the size of the entire US economy

If there’s one thing that AI companies are known for, it’s their fondness for seemingly incomprehensible numbers.

Over the last few years, the industry has seen eye-watering salaries, unprecedented adoption figures, and never-before-recorded capital expenditure.

Now come total addressable market estimates—known as TAMs—worth roughly 40% of the entire US equity market.

AI lab Anthropic, reportedly on the verge of a $2 trillion IPO, is preparing to tell investors that its total addressable market is worth more than $30 trillion , according to a report in the Wall Street Journal .

To put that figure in perspective, it eclipses the total GDP of China, is roughly equal to the entire GDP of the U.S., and represents about a quarter of the total world GDP of $120 trillion.

Rather than a forecast of Anthropic’s imminent sales, a total addressable market, or TAM, is the annual revenue a company could theoretically generate if it captured 100% of the relevant market.

TAMs are staple of the pitch decks entrepreneurs use to try to persuade venture capital firms to back them, as they give some sense of how big the company could potentially become.

But they are also a common figure for IPO-stage companies attempting to justify the gulf between current revenue and a company’s proposed valuation.

In Anthropic’s case, according to the Journal , rather than starting with a category such as enterprise software, cloud computing, or AI subscriptions, the lab is said to be basing its TAM estimate on the full scope of work that could be completed with AI models.

Unlike traditional enterprise software, which made workers more productive but rarely replaced them outright, Anthropic and its peers argue that their models can increasingly perform knowledge‑work tasks end‑to‑end—from drafting legal documents to writing and reviewing code.

That means the company can frame its TAM as the value of all the human labor its systems could theoretically substitute for across sectors such as legal, accounting, engineering, and business process outsourcing, Alex Brunicki, co‑founder and general partner at Backed VC, told Fortune .

“With things like Claude and the way it writes code, you could argue it’s replacing the work that humans do end-to-end, and so the TAM for those products is essentially the labor market for that work output,” he said.

However, he noted Anthropic’s ability to capture a large share of that market could easily come under pressure as more companies adopt industry‑specific models built on cheaper open‑source systems.

Anthropic is not the first company to propose a larger-than-life TAM.