Anthropic’s $30 trillion market dimension estimate is outlandish. That often is the level.

AI lab Anthropic, reportedly on the verge of a $2 trillion IPO, is preparing to tell investors that its total addressable market is worth more than $30 trillion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

To put that figure in perspective, it eclipses the total GDP of China, is roughly equal to the entire GDP of the U.S., and represents about a quarter of the total world GDP of $120 trillion.

Rather than a forecast of Anthropic’s imminent sales, a total addressable market, or TAM, is the annual revenue a company could theoretically generate if it captured 100% of the relevant market. TAMs are staple of the pitch decks entrepreneurs use to try to persuade venture capital firms to back them, as they give some sense of how big the company could potentially become. But they are also a common figure for IPO-stage companies attempting to justify the gulf between current revenue and a company’s proposed valuation. 

In Anthropic’s case, according to the Journal, rather than starting with a category such as enterprise software, cloud computing, or AI subscriptions, the lab is said to be basing its TAM estimate 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 means the company can frame its TAM as the value of all the human labor its systems could theoretically substitute for across sectors such as 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 Anthropic’s ability to capture a large share of that market could easily 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 TAM at $28.5 trillion. Back in 2019, Uber famously cited a total addressable market (TAM) of $6 trillion by calculating the total mileage value of all personal cars and public transport worldwide.

At the time, some financial analysts and valuation experts criticized this $6 trillion figure as aggressive marketing rather than serious math. Many are equally skeptical of Anthropic’s figure.

“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, an investment newsletter, 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 also noted that professional investors will likely treat Anthropic’s TAM less as a literal forecast and more as a kind of 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, as Brunicki notes, can be inspiring for individual traders and smaller investors who may not sit down to build their own spreadsheets.

“Sophisticated investors are going to build their own cash‑flow models,” he said. They will look at Anthropic’s current markets, its contracts and near‑term product roadmap, and then forecast revenue over the next five or so years on that basis. 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, Brunicki said.

Echoes of the dot-com era 

There are easy parallels to draw between the dot-com boom and the current AI boom.

Dot-com era IPOs similarly leaned on a strategy of using a future imagined market instead of a company’s current balance sheet to bridge the gap between price and performance. For example, 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 were some similarities with the dot‑com era, the underlying businesses of AI companies look different. He said that many leading AI companies are already generating substantial revenue, rather than listing on “user numbers” alone. 

Anthropic’s own annualized 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 just two months earlier, in May. 

At the same time, however, investors are watching closely how much leverage and debt flows into financing data center 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.

“It’s our fundamental belief that the size of companies that are going to be built in this wave are going to be larger than any other companies that have come before them,” Brunicki said. “But it’s also our belief that the mortality rates of some of these companies and the likely blowouts of all of these businesses is also going to be large as well.” Many of the companies currently raising at multi‑billion‑dollar valuations, he warned, “are going to go to zero.”