Wall Street’s top banks are locking in the prize roles as the Claude maker prepares a listing that could top SpaceX.
Anthropic is closing in on Morgan Stanley as “lead left” and Goldman Sachs as stabilization agent for what bankers have pitched as a $2 trillion debut. The company filed a confidential S-1 on June 1 and is still targeting a fall listing, though the public prospectus has slipped to late September. Marketing would start in mid-October, with a possible first trade days before the U.S. midterms.
That timetable is not a retreat. It is the last piece of pre-IPO plumbing: a $15 billion revolving credit line led by the same banks that want the underwriting fees.
The $2 trillion math
Bankers have told potential investors the offering could raise more than $100 billion and value Anthropic near $2 trillion, above SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion June listing. The last private mark was $965 billion after a $65 billion Series H in May. Revenue is the argument. Annualized sales hit about $65 billion by late July, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. Second-quarter revenue was $11.6 billion. Investors now model $100–120 billion by year-end and $190–200 billion in 2028.
A $2 trillion price would be roughly 30 times the current run rate and about 10 times the 2028 forecast. That is a long reach. Public markets have no listed peer for a frontier-model lab.
Who gets the fees
Morgan Stanley is in pole position for lead left—the bank that runs valuation talks and allocations. Goldman is expected to stabilize the first sessions of trading. JPMorgan, Citigroup and Barclays are in line for major roles after helping arrange the credit facility. The same four banks sit at the top of the $15 billion revolver syndicate. That is the SpaceX playbook, scaled up.
Underwriting fees on a deal this size run into the hundreds of millions. The banks already split a half-billion-dollar pot on SpaceX.
Why it matters now
Anthropic still has no official target. CFO Krishna Rao has declined to pin a number in investor meetings. The company is also preparing super-voting shares for co-founders, a common founder-control move. Data-center backlash and AI regulation are expected risk factors in the prospectus.
OpenAI remains on a slower clock, likely 2027. Whoever lists first sets the public multiple for the entire sector. A $2 trillion Anthropic would test whether investors will pay for growth two years out—or whether the AI boom finally meets a public-market ceiling.
AI Disclosure: This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools and was reviewed and edited by the Glowls News editorial team before publication.