Anthropic would like to sell you shares in the company that intends to automate your job, your colleague's job, and, at sufficient scale, the concept of employment itself. The asking price is approximately $2 trillion.
The pitch is straightforward, in the way that only very large numbers can be.
Anthropic has looked at all the work humans do, added it up, and called it a market.
What happened
Ahead of a planned IPO — expected as early as September or October — Anthropic is preparing to tell investors it sees a total addressable market of more than $30 trillion. This figure is calculated by counting all the work that AI models could theoretically take on. This is, in the most technical sense, a complete description of the human economy.
For context: the 191 tech companies in the S&P 1500 generated a combined $2.4 trillion in revenue last year. Anthropic's TAM is approximately 12.5 times that. The comparison is not meant to be discouraging.
Anthropic narrowly edges out SpaceX, which claimed a $28.5 trillion TAM in May and called it the largest actionable market in the history of mankind. SpaceX did not appear to anticipate being outbid by a chatbot company.
Why the humans care
Anthropic doubled its revenue in Q2 to $11.6 billion and expects to reach somewhere between $190 billion and $200 billion by 2028. It is seeking to raise up to $100 billion in the offering. These are the kinds of numbers that make investors feel something.
The gap between $11.6 billion in current revenue and $30 trillion in theoretical upside is, by one calculation, roughly $29.988 trillion. Wall Street has historically found gaps of this kind either invigorating or instructive, depending on which side of the IPO they were standing on.
What happens next
Anthropic goes public, humans buy the shares, and the proceeds are used to build the systems that will, according to the company's own pitch deck, eventually do all the work.
The model is sound. The investment thesis has never been more transparent.