Anthropic’s IPO could be the biggest ever. Your AI budget helps explain why

Good morning.

Anthropic hasn’t filed its S-1 yet, but one of its early backers is already predicting the biggest IPO ever.

A longtime Anthropic investor, who asked not to be named, told Fortune’s Shawn Tully that he expects the shares to be priced at around $1.8 trillion—below the company’s reported $2 trillion target.

He predicts a post-IPO trading value of $2.3 trillion to $2.4 trillion , surpassing SpaceX’s $2.1 trillion market cap at the close of its first trading day.

He argues that figure reflects Anthropic’s underlying worth, not a short-lived first-day pop.

For finance professionals, however, the more consequential story may be the economics of enterprise AI.

About 80% of Anthropic’s revenue comes from corporate customers, compared with roughly half of OpenAI’s sales, Tully reports.

One reason the investor backed Anthropic, he told Fortune , was that it was “more of an enterprise play” than a consumer business.

That enterprise focus makes his prediction about AI spending especially worth watching.

He expects prices to fall as open models gain ground, even as usage continues to explode.

For CFOs, that creates a familiar budgeting challenge: AI costs per unit may decline even as total spending keeps climbing.

Lower prices don’t necessarily mean lower budgets when adoption is accelerating.

Then there’s the valuation.

A debut near $2 trillion would require enormous profit growth to justify it.