Secondary markets are valuing Anthropic at approximately $1 trillion, while the company's investment bankers (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan) are targeting a $400–500 billion valuation for a potential IPO—a 2x discrepancy that highlights real time price discovery happening ahead of…
The real price of Anthropic is not what the company thinks it is worth — and secondary markets are not waiting for the IPO to find out which number is right.
Business Insider broke new reporting at 00:29 UTC Thursday, with Hiive — a regulated secondary platform — showing live orders at approximately $846 per share as of Wednesday. That print translates to a valuation well above the $400 billion to $500 billion range where Anthropic's own bankers are targeting the IPO. Secondary markets are now performing price discovery for frontier AI companies in real time — detached from primary fundraising rounds, ahead of the public listing, and with more liquidity than the private sale process ever provided. Who is right, the secondary or the bankers, will determine how every future AI company prices its public debut.
The immediate trigger is a genuine revenue surge. Anthropic closed a $30 billion Series G round in February at a $380 billion post-money valuation. Three months later, its annualized revenue run rate has grown from $9 billion to $30 billion — a 233% quarterly increase, per The Next Web citing Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, and PYMNTS. More than 500 customers now spend over $1 million annually with Anthropic. Eight of the Fortune 10 use Claude. Claude Code, the company's AI coding assistant, is generating over $2.5 billion in annualized revenue and doubling every few months, the company reported at Series G.
But the secondary market is not waiting for the IPO to reprice that growth. On Hiive, orders were stacking at prices implying a valuation well above the IPO target as of Wednesday. On Forge Global — the largest private share marketplace — Anthropic hovers near $1 trillion, overtaking OpenAI's $880 billion valuation on the same platform, Business Insider reported. Rainmaker Securities CEO Glen Anderson told Business Insider he received an offer to buy Anthropic shares at a $960 billion valuation, and before he could evaluate it, another buyer had already closed. A Saints Capital shareholder offered to sell at $1.15 trillion. In one case documented by market participants, a buyer offered a house in exchange for Anthropic shares.
Anderson described much of the demand as FOMO-driven rather than fundamentals-backed — almost less about the return than being able to say they are an Anthropic investor.
Anthropic is not selling. The company has engaged Wilson Sonsini for IPO-related preparations since at least December 2025, Reuters reported. The IPO target of $400 billion to $500 billion, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan advising and a possible October listing, represents the board's judgment about what public markets will bear — a judgment the secondary market has emphatically overruled.
The dynamic inverts for OpenAI, once the category's presumed frontrunner. The seller-to-buyer ratio for OpenAI secondary shares flipped to five-to-one in the first quarter of 2026, according to data from Caplight cited by The Next Web — five sellers for every buyer. On Forge Global, OpenAI trades at approximately $880 billion, barely above its primary valuation from earlier this year. The sentiment has shifted to Anthropic, Anderson said.
There is a structural reason the secondary matters more than it used to. Forge Global publishes model-based prices for pre-IPO companies that synthesize actual transaction activity, indications of interest, and comparative primary round data — an approach that attempts to price a private company the way a public market does, through supply and demand signal, rather than through negotiated primary rounds. In Anthropic's case, that model is producing a number the company's own bankers think is too high.
Whether that number is right will play out at the IPO. If Anthropic prices at $400 billion to $500 billion and pops on day one, it validates the secondary as a prescient indicator — and every future AI IPO will be priced against secondary benchmarks before it files. If it prices closer to $1 trillion and does not pop, the secondary market will be remembered as a FOMO machine that got out ahead of itself. Either outcome reshapes how capital flows into AI. The secondary market is no longer a footnote. For Anthropic right now, it is the main event.