Anthropic: Crypto Investors Are Willing to Pay a Valuation of Nearly $2 Trillion

Anthropic is preparing the largest IPO in history. Investment bankers have reportedly floated a listing worth up to $2 trillion for the maker of Claude, which would make it the most valuable company ever to go public, ahead of SpaceX. Whether that number holds is already being tested on crypto exchanges, where traders have been putting a price on Anthropic for months. And that price points to exactly the same territory.

Almost $2,000 per Token

On Binance, the ANTHROPICUSDT pre-IPO perpetual contract recently traded at $1,934.25. The exchange bases the contract on an estimated total of one billion Anthropic shares, while noting that the actual count may differ. Extrapolated, that implies a valuation of roughly $1.93 trillion.

On the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, where Entropy runs the ANTH perp, the price sits at $1,934.50, effectively identical to the cent.

For context: Anthropic's most recent funding round, a $65 billion Series H, valued the company at $965 billion. Crypto traders are paying precisely twice that.

Anthropic Ahead of SpaceX and OpenAI

A third picture comes from PreStocks, a platform that issues tokenized stakes on Solana and says they are backed by SPV exposure. An Anthropic token there costs around $871, and the platform derives an implied valuation of about $1.41 trillion from it, because it assumes considerably more than one billion shares outstanding. Per-token prices across venues are therefore not directly comparable, though the valuations derived from them are.

The resulting ranking is telling. Anthropic leads at $1.41 trillion, ahead of SpaceX at roughly $1.36 trillion and OpenAI at about $1.14 trillion. Well behind them come Elon Musk's xAI at $247 billion, defense contractor Anduril at $133 billion, Neuralink at just under $52 billion, and the two prediction markets Kalshi at $33 billion and Polymarket at $13.6 billion.

At that level, Anthropic would enter the ranks of the world's most valuable companies overnight, worth a multiple of European tech heavyweights such as SAP or ASML.

These Are Not Shares

Anyone buying these instruments is not buying a stake in Anthropic. The company issues no shares to the public and prohibits transfers to special purpose vehicles. In a recent statement, Anthropic said such transfers are void, and that third parties selling stakes through forwards or tokenized securities are either committing fraud or offering a product that may be worthless. PreStocks itself states in its terms that the tokens carry no ownership, voting, dividend or information rights, and that they are not available in the United States.

What changes hands instead are derivatives, financial instruments whose value is derived from an underlying asset without the holder owning it. Settlement happens in cash.

The specific form used on Binance and Hyperliquid is the perpetual future, or perp. A traditional future has an expiry date, a perp runs indefinitely. To keep its price tethered to the underlying, a mechanism called the funding rate kicks in: when the contract trades above the reference price, buyers pay a periodic fee to sellers, and the other way around. For listed companies, this keeps the perp close to the share price. For Anthropic, there is no share price to anchor it. The contract tracks nothing beyond the expectations of the traders holding it.

On the regulated secondary market, where platforms such as Hiive and Forge broker actual employee shares with the company's approval, implied valuations have recently ranged between $830 billion and $1.2 trillion. The gap to the crypto price of $1.93 trillion is a fair gauge of how much imagination is currently priced into the AI market.