Anthropic, the AI lab reportedly preparing for a $2 trillion initial public offering, is set to present investors with a total addressable market estimate of more than $30 trillion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The figure is roughly equivalent to the entire annual output of the US economy, eclipses China's GDP, and represents about a quarter of total world GDP of $120 trillion.
A total addressable market, or TAM, is the annual revenue a company could theoretically generate if it captured 100% of the relevant market. It is a staple of pitch decks used to persuade venture capital firms to back startups, but it is also commonly deployed by IPO-stage companies seeking to justify the gap between current revenue and a proposed valuation. In Anthropic's case, the lab is said to be basing its estimate not on a category such as enterprise software or cloud computing, but on the full scope of work that could be completed with AI models.
Unlike traditional enterprise software, which made workers more productive but rarely replaced them outright, Anthropic and its peers argue that their models can increasingly perform knowledge-work tasks end-to-end, from drafting legal documents to writing and reviewing code. That allows the company to frame its TAM as the value of all the human labour its systems could theoretically substitute for across sectors including legal, accounting, engineering, and business process outsourcing, Alex Brunicki, co-founder and general partner at Backed VC, told Fortune.
«With things like Claude and the way it writes code, you could argue it's replacing the work that humans do end-to-end, and so the TAM for those products is essentially the labor market for that work output,» he said. However, he noted that Anthropic's ability to capture a large share of that market could come under pressure as more companies adopt industry-specific models built on cheaper open-source systems.
Anthropic is not the first company to propose a larger-than-life TAM. SpaceX recently estimated its own at $28.5 trillion, and in 2019 Uber cited a $6 trillion figure by calculating the total mileage value of all personal cars and public transport worldwide. At the time, some financial analysts criticised that estimate as aggressive marketing rather than serious math, and many are equally sceptical of Anthropic's number.
«Another way of looking at absurdity of the $30 trillion addressable market claim: annual U.S. GDP is currently $32.5 trillion,» Fred Hickey, tech analyst and editor of The High-Tech Strategist, wrote on X. «And yet this nonsense (wild proclamations and predictions) is allowed to continue so that Wall St. & Silly-con-Valley can extract as much money from unwitting 'investors' as possible, before the inevitable stock market bubble collapses.»
Brunicki said professional investors will likely treat Anthropic's TAM less as a literal forecast and more as a mission statement. Retail investors, however, are more likely to take the figure at face value. The sheer scale of the number is «headline-grabbing» and can be inspiring for individual traders who may not build their own spreadsheets, he said. «Sophisticated investors are going to build their own cash-flow models,» he added, looking at current markets, contracts, and near-term product roadmaps to forecast revenue over the next five years. Near-term revenue targets, such as Anthropic's reported ambition to reach close to $200 billion in annual sales by the end of the decade, are what serious investors will pay closer attention to.
There are easy parallels to draw between the dot-com boom and the current AI boom. Dot-com era IPOs similarly leaned on future imagined markets rather than current balance sheets to bridge the gap between price and performance. By October 1999, the 199 internet stocks tracked by Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker carried a combined $450 billion market cap against just $21 billion in total sales and $6.2 billion in collective losses.
Brunicki said that while there are some similarities with the dot-com era, the underlying businesses of AI companies look different. Many leading AI companies are already generating substantial revenue rather than listing on user numbers alone. Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate surpassed $65 billion at the end of July, according to Bloomberg, more than seven times the roughly $9 billion pace it was running at the end of 2025 and up from $47 billion in May. At the same time, investors are watching closely how much leverage and debt flows into financing data centre build-outs and AI infrastructure. In private markets, Brunicki said, some AI startups are raising at «extremely high, frothy valuations» that are unlikely to be sustainable.