$600 billion. This is the 2030 revenue forecast Goldman Sachs showed a potential investor during its Anthropic roadshow.
Breaking it down is this line: about 4.6 billion US dollars in 2025, 52 billion in 2026, 136 billion in 2027, 442 billion in 2029, and more than 600 billion in 2030. A 130-fold increase in five years.
If it really gets to that point, Claude's company will squeeze into the small group of companies with the highest revenue in the world, standing in a row with Wal-Mart and Amazon.
But there's another line in the same forecast that's not so pretty: Free cash flow won't turn positive until 2030. In other words, according to the underwriter's own model, the company was burning money on a net basis throughout the entire process when its revenue reached hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s not hard to guess where the money is spent, computing power contracts and data centers.
These numbers should be read with identity. Goldman Sachs is the underwriter, and the job of the roadshow materials is to sell the stocks, so the forecasts naturally tend to be optimistic. The 52 billion in 2026 is relatively credible, because Anthropic itself has just disclosed that the annualized revenue as of the end of October was US$81 billion, and it is not outrageous to achieve 52 billion for the whole year. For later numbers, assumptions are stacked on top of each other.
What’s really worth pondering is the $136 billion in 2027. Going from 52 billion to 136 billion means an additional $84 billion in revenue next year, more than it has earned since its inception combined. Whether the AI budget of enterprise customers can increase this much, and whether Google and OpenAI will lower the price, these two things are not in Anthropic's hands.
The prospectus updated on the same day also disclosed that the seven co-founders planned to cash out approximately US$250 million each in the IPO.