Forget SpaceX's TAM — Anthropic Is Reportedly Eyeing $30 Trillion Opportunity, Just Shy Of US GDP

Anthropic is expected to discuss its unusually large TAM with investors as part of its potential IPO process.

• SpaceX previously called its $28.5 trillion TAM the “largest actionable” market in human history, with most of the opportunity tied to AI.
• Anthropic’s revenue more than doubled sequentially to $11.6 billion in Q2, while OpenAI’s sales rose 18% to $6.7 billion, according to reports.
• Anthropic could launch its IPO as soon as next month or early October, while OpenAI has reportedly pushed its offering to next year.

Anthropic reportedly expects its total addressable market (TAM) to reach $30 trillion, just a few trillion dollars shy of U.S. GDP and higher than the $28.5 trillion TAM SpaceX has estimated for itself.

The Claude AI developer is likely to discuss its unusually high TAM projections with investors as part of its initial public offering (IPO) process, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. 

Tech startups and high-growth companies going public often estimate their TAMs to show investors they have ample room to grow. TAM essentially denotes the annual revenue a company could theoretically capture if it achieved 100% market share.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX called its TAM “the largest actionable” market in “human history” when it revealed the figure in a May filing. Most of the figure was attributed to opportunities in AI.

New York University’s Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor known as “the Dean of Valuation,” told The Wall Street Journal ahead of SpaceX’s June IPO that the TAM the company saw in AI was “reaching the end of what’s plausible and pushing beyond.”

SpaceX shares initially jumped in its IPO but have since languished. After falling below $105 a share in intraday trading in early August, shares now trade around their $135 offering price.

AI Market Estimates

The market for AI solutions is expanding rapidly, but future growth has been hard to estimate. Anthropic more than doubled its revenue sequentially to $11.6 billion in the second quarter, while OpenAI’s sales rose 18% to $6.7 billion, according to a recent Journal report based on information from its sources.

To put its more than $30 trillion vision in context, the 191 technology companies in the S&P 1500 brought in $2.4 trillion in revenue last year, the Journal reported, citing FactSet figures.

Nicholas Mugalli of World Trade Securities argued that, $30 trillion TAM estimate notwithstanding, the opportunity for Anthropic is huge. 

“Even if you apply a cynical, ultra-bearish haircut and assume these forward estimates are 90% to 95% nonsense, capturing just 5% of these numbers generates cash flows that eclipse Nvidia’s entire market cap today,” Mugalli said in an X post.

World Trade Securities projects Anthropic breaking $120 billion in revenue by year-end and scaling to $1 trillion next year, a nearly 10x top-line growth.

OpenAI On Backfoot

Recent reports revealed that Anthropic could launch its IPO next month or in early October, while OpenAI has pushed its offering to next year. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a recent podcast that AI companies, including his own, might have overestimated the AI industry’s pace of growth. We've all been too ambitious on timelines. Even with this incredible technology, society and the economy will adapt more slowly."

The divergence in OpenAI and Anthropic’s revenue highlights how quickly the AI race has shifted, with slower ChatGPT growth and Claude Code’s success putting OpenAI on the back foot.

On Tuesday, OpenAI published performance benchmarks for its maiden custom inference silicon, code-named Jalapeño, demonstrating advantages in speed and energy efficiency over Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell chips.

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment was ‘bullish’ for OpenAI and Anthropic. Anthropic is valued at $1.13 trillion, compared to OpenAI’s private market valuation of $879.02 billion, according to data from Nasdaq Private Market.

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