The race for the largest IPO of 2026 has a new challenger, and it hasn’t even filed a public prospectus yet. Prediction market data from Polymarket shows Anthropic rapidly closing the gap with SpaceX for the title of the year’s biggest public offering, driven by revenue growth that is accelerating faster than most analysts had modeled just months ago. Bloomberg reported that Anthropic’s annualized revenue for 2026 is now on track to top $65 billion, up sharply from a $47 billion pace in May, positioning the company for a potential fourth quarter market debut.
Notably, OpenAI, Anthropic’s chief rival and another company that could plausibly go public later this year, is not currently registering as a serious contender in the same prediction market data, despite its own scale and continued speculation about a near-term listing.
SpaceX Still Holds the Crown, for Now
For context on what Anthropic would actually need to beat, SpaceX priced its historic offering at $135 per share on June 11, selling 555.6 million shares and valuing the company at $1.78 trillion. The stock opened for trading the following day around $150 and climbed steadily through the session on heavy institutional and retail demand, closing its first day at $160.95, a 19.2% gain that instantly pushed SpaceX’s market capitalization to $2.1 trillion. Shares later peaked near $225 before falling to lows around $104 as investors grew concerned about upcoming lockup expirations and the scale of the company’s capital expenditure plans, a volatility pattern we detailed closely in our coverage of the debut itself. SpaceX has since recovered to roughly $146 a share, valuing the company at $1.93 trillion.
One market strategist covering the name recently argued that betting against Elon Musk has historically been a losing strategy and expects that to remain true here as well, while cautioning investors to prepare for continued sharp swings in either direction.
What the Anthropic Comparison Actually Reveals
Anthropic is currently valued at approximately $1 trillion in private markets, compared to $894 billion for OpenAI, according to Yahoo Finance private market tracking data. That $65 billion annualized revenue run rate is the more important number in this story, since prediction markets are not simply betting on company size, they are betting on whether Anthropic’s growth trajectory can support an offering large enough to eclipse SpaceX’s historic debut, an event we covered as it happened back on June 12.
For investors watching the 2026 IPO calendar, and by extension the broader capital rotation such offerings tend to trigger across public markets, this is worth tracking closely for a specific reason. When Anthropic filed confidentially for its IPO this summer at a reported valuation approaching $965 billion, we noted that the AI capital cycle had entered a genuinely new phase. A fourth quarter debut that could rival or exceed SpaceX’s own historic listing would represent the clearest confirmation yet of that thesis, and would likely reignite the same kind of capital rotation into smaller AI infrastructure and services companies that followed SpaceX’s own debut in June.
