This probability distribution shows a typical feature of “high-confidence concentration above the trillion-dollar mark”—the market’s mainstream view is not merely moderate growth, but that Anthropic will directly cross the $1 trillion threshold by year-end. So, what is the basis for this judgment?
What probability distribution do Polymarket’s betting data reveal?
From a 93% probability of betting on valuations above $1 trillion, falling to 33% once it surpasses $2 trillion, this probability curve outlines the market’s expected boundary for the upper range of Anthropic’s valuation. The key message is that the market is almost uninterested in the low valuation range (below $1 trillion), while expectations are most concentrated in the $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion range, with all three tiers having probabilities above 50%.
Source: Polymarket
What’s also noteworthy is that funds betting on the high valuation range do not drop sharply to zero as the target rises. At $2.5 trillion, 16% probability remains; above $3 trillion, it stays at 13%, indicating that some traders still believe extreme overvaluation is possible. This kind of probability distribution structure, in practice, reflects two perceptions of the AI track: mainstream expectations point to stable growth at the trillion-dollar scale, while tail expectations point to more imaginative space.
This betting distribution also cross-validates with other related contracts on Polymarket. The platform’s data shows a 94% probability that Anthropic’s 2026 valuation will exceed OpenAI’s, and roughly a 69% probability that Anthropic will enter the public market earlier than OpenAI. Taken together across these contracts, the conclusion is clear: the market is not only highly optimistic about Anthropic’s absolute valuation, but also believes it holds an advantage in relative competition.
How massive funding rounds drive valuations to jump quickly
Behind the valuation expectations is first the sheer size and pace of the funding rounds themselves. In February 2026, Anthropic completed a $30 billion Series G round, with a post-investment valuation of $380 billion. Just three months later, according to a May 13 report by The New York Times, Anthropic is in talks with investors for a new round of $30 billion to $50 billion; once completed, its post-investment valuation would reach $950 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation after its March funding this year to become the AI company with the highest valuation globally.
If you extend the timeline, the acceleration in valuation growth becomes even more obvious: March 2025 (Series E) valuation of $61.5 billion, September 2025 (Series F) of $183 billion, February 2026 (Series G) of $380 billion, and then the reported $950 billion in May—within 14 months, the valuation growth exceeds 15 times.
Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that the round may close as early as the end of May 2026, with a target size up to $50 billion. If calculated using $44 billion ARR, that corresponds to a price-to-sales (revenue multiple) of about 21 to 23 times. In traditional SaaS, this valuation level is far above the typical 8 to 12 times range, but in a backdrop where annualized revenue doubles on a quarterly cadence, the market’s tolerance for premium pricing has been significantly elevated.
Can revenue growth support trillion-dollar valuation expectations?
The core underpinning of a high valuation is revenue growth. As of May 2026, Anthropic’s annualized revenue has climbed to over $44 billion. That is nearly 5x growth from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. In the past 12 months, annualized revenue added $35 billion, equivalent to about $96 million growth per day.
The acceleration in revenue growth shows a distinct step-like pattern. From December 2024 to September 2025, ARR grew by about $4 billion; from September 2025 to February 2026, it increased by another roughly $5 billion; and the real surge happened after February 2026—within just 3 months, ARR jumped from $14 billion to $44 billion. This growth curve implies that the slope of revenue growth itself is accelerating, not steadily progressing in a linear way.
The key engine driving revenue growth is the programming tool Claude Code. Since its release in May 2025, Claude Code’s annualized revenue has reached $2.5 billion. It commands a 54% share of the AI programming tools market, significantly outpacing major competitors. Around 4% of GitHub’s publicly submitted code is done by Claude Code, and that share is still rising rapidly.
On profitability, Anthropic’s inference gross margin has risen from roughly 38% in early periods to above 70%, with unit economics improving markedly. This suggests that revenue growth is not simply relying on large-scale compute subsidies, but also accompanied by optimization in its cost structure. On the other hand, Anthropic plans to spend about $19 billion in 2026 on training and inference compute. Inference costs are about 23% higher than expected, compressing gross margin to around 40%, and the company expects it will not reach break-even until 2028.
Wall Street investment banks’ assessment of valuation room also rests on the sustainability of revenue growth. If you assume that end-of-2026 ARR approaches $60 billion, then applying a 23x ARR multiple yields a valuation close to the $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion range. This closely matches Polymarket’s current main betting range of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
Why does the prediction market concentrate bets on the trillion-dollar threshold?
Polymarket’s high concentration of bets is driven by four mutually reinforcing logics: the positive feedback effect of funding rounds, strategic games among cloud providers, the timing window of IPO expectations, and the narrative structure inherent to the AI track itself.
From the perspective of funding rounds, Anthropic’s funding pace shows an acceleration pattern where valuation doubles every 3 to 5 months. If the target valuation of $950 billion closes on schedule by the end of May, then within the 7-month window from May to December, combined with another funding round or price discovery in the secondary market, it is mathematically not necessary to have an extraordinary growth rate for valuations to rise into the $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion range.
From the perspective of strategic investors, Amazon and Google announced large investment plans for Anthropic in April 2026. Amazon pledged that over the next 10 years it will invest more than $100 billion in AWS technology procurement and add $25 billion in investment; Google announced $10 billion in cash and pledged to add up to $30 billion after performance milestones are reached, bringing the total cap to $40 billion. Deep ties from multiple cloud vendors provide stable channel support for long-term penetration with enterprise customers.
IPO expectations are also a critical variable in driving valuation. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic expects to initiate an IPO as early as October 2026, with fundraising that could exceed $60 billion. This timing window means that Polymarket’s contract deadline of December 31 falls right within the overlapping period of IPO execution and the first round of price discovery after listing.
More fundamentally, it is the AI track’s valuation logic itself: unlike traditional SaaS companies, leading large-model enterprises are given a narrative positioning as “the next-generation computing platform.” Chen Yu, a managing partner at Qiming Venture Capital, previously said that if large models can handle part of knowledge work at one-tenth the cost, then “a trillion-dollar valuation isn’t necessarily expensive,” corresponding to a potential market on the order of ten trillion. This logic is directly reflected in the funds betting in Polymarket.
What factors could cause actual valuations to deviate from expectations
Even though market sentiment is highly aligned, there are several key variables during valuation execution that could pull actual values downward.
The biggest variable is disagreement over revenue recognition methodology. OpenAI has publicly questioned that Anthropic’s $30 billion annualized revenue uses the gross revenue recognition method—when customers use its models through platforms such as Amazon Cloud and Google Cloud, Anthropic records all end-user consumption as revenue, then records the revenue share paid to the cloud platform as an expense. OpenAI estimates that after subtracting these revenue shares, Anthropic’s true annual revenue is closer to $22 billion. The roughly $8 billion difference is not merely an accounting technical issue; it will become a focus of regulatory scrutiny and market review during the IPO.
The second major variable is how dependent the valuation itself is on growth rates. Using the target valuation of $950 billion and based on approximately $44 billion ARR, the price-to-sales ratio is about 20x—far above the SaaS industry average of 8x to 12x. To support the current valuation, Anthropic needs to sustain at least 50% year-over-year growth for the next 3 years. If revenue growth slows in the second half of 2026, the pressure for valuation correction would increase significantly.
The third major variable comes from market competition and policy risk. In both consumer and enterprise products, Anthropic faces intense competition from OpenAI, Google, and xAI. In addition, Anthropic’s prior contract dispute with the Department of Defense and the “supply chain risk” label placed by the U.S. government add uncertainty to both the IPO process and business expansion.
Inferring the year-end valuation range from multi-dimensional logic
Combining funding progress, revenue growth rates, IPO expectations, and the competitive landscape, it is possible to infer the year-end valuation through multi-dimensional logic.
Anchoring on the probability distribution of Polymarket’s bets, market expectations show the features of “a core range of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, with the tail extending beyond $2 trillion.” This distribution structure effectively establishes three layers of valuation references: $950 billion as a baseline reference, $1.1 trillion to $1.25 trillion as the median expectation, and $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion as the high-elasticity scenario. Looking at the 33% betting probability at the $2 trillion tier, the market does not view this target as an extreme surprise, but assigns it substantial weight.
The reasonableness of this probability distribution needs to be evaluated within the broader AI industry valuation coordinate system. Current OpenAI valuation is about $852 billion, with ARR around $24 billion to $25 billion; SpaceX’s valuation is about $1.4 trillion to $1.75 trillion; Anthropic’s $950 billion funding valuation sits between them, but its roughly $44 billion ARR is already significantly higher than OpenAI’s at the same time. Using price-to-sales as the valuation anchor: if OpenAI’s price-to-sales multiple is about 34x to 35x, then $44 billion ARR corresponds to an approximately $1.5 trillion valuation—matching the overlap with Polymarket’s 54% betting probability range. This arithmetic relationship indicates the market’s pricing is not a baseless guess disconnected from fundamentals, but a careful game played on top of a price-to-sales multiple anchor.
For those tracking Polymarket contracts, there are three core variables to watch continuously:
- Whether the actual valuation materializes after the funding closes at the end of May;
- Whether ARR driven by Claude Code can sustain the momentum of doubling each quarter;
- The pacing of key time nodes leading up to the IPO.
Every round of funding announcements or disclosures of financial data may trigger the market to reprice expectations, and movements in the Polymarket contract prices themselves will also同步 reflect the collective update in market perception of the variables above.
FAQ
Q: How does Polymarket’s valuation contract determine the result?
Polymarket has reached an exclusive data collaboration agreement with Nasdaq Private Market. It will serve as the contract’s exclusive settlement data provider, and the final result will be determined based on its daily-updated private market valuation estimates. If Anthropic completes an IPO before the contract expires, settlement is based on transaction prices in the public market.
Q: Does the 93% probability shown in Polymarket data equal the probability of the true valuation?
The prices in prediction markets reflect participants’ collective expectations rather than objective probabilities, and their accuracy is influenced by many factors such as liquidity, participant composition, and information access. When the contract’s total trading volume continues to expand, the market representativeness of the price signal improves accordingly.
Q: Is it possible for Anthropic’s valuation by the end of 2026 to be below $1 trillion?
Polymarket data shows that the probability below $800 billion is only 16%, but there are still constraints on valuation outcomes. These mainly include: disagreements over revenue recognition methodology may face stricter regulatory scrutiny during the IPO stage; once the growth expectations implied by a high price-to-sales multiple fail to be realized, it will create pressure for valuation pullbacks; and risks from competitors’ product iteration and market-share battles.
