Cryptocurrency traders are betting that Anthropic, the artificial intelligence (AI) company behind the Claude chatbot, will be worth about $1.9 trillion when it lists on the stock market.
The valuation is implied by pre-IPO perpetual contracts, a type of derivative with no expiry date that lets traders bet on a company's value before its shares start trading.
The figure is twice the valuation from Anthropic's last private funding round, according to research from FalconX, a crypto trading firm.
Trading interest in the contracts has grown eightfold in 10 weeks to $134 million.
The largest market, on the Hyperliquid exchange, and the second largest, on Binance, both imply a value of about $1.88 trillion.
However, FalconX said similar markets had overestimated the final listing values of SpaceX and SK Hynix, the South Korean chipmaker.
If Anthropic follows the same pattern, it could float at between $1.49 trillion and $1.73 trillion.
The valuation implied by the contracts peaked at about $2.2 trillion on 9 September and has since fallen by around 15%.
Martin Gaspar, senior crypto market strategist at FalconX, said the decline may reflect weakness in AI infrastructure stocks.
CoreWeave, which rents out computing power for AI, has fallen 37% since 9 September, while Oracle has dropped 19%.
Reuters reported in October that investors at Anthropic's investor day had discussed a valuation of $1.5 trillion, below earlier expectations of $2 trillion.
Gaspar said rising trading volumes gave the crypto market's pricing more weight.
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