Why Anthropic Stock Could Be the Most Talked-About Investment You’re Not Allowed to Make

The people who founded and manage Anthropic are looking at revenue figures that would make the majority of publicly traded software companies feel truly ashamed of their own performance in a conference room somewhere in San Francisco, most likely on a Tuesday afternoon with coffee cooling on a side table. In just a few months, annual recurring revenue increased from $9 billion to $30 billion. Every year, more than a thousand business clients write seven-figure checks. According to data from the business spending platform Ramp, 73.3% of businesses choosing their first AI vendor now favor an AI model called Claude over OpenAI. However, you are unable to purchase a share of Anthropic. not via a brokerage account. Not on a trade. The company is still private, and most investors can’t access it.

A lot of intriguing financial energy has recently been concentrated in that gap between the size of what Anthropic has grown into and the inaccessibility of its equity. Early in April, Michael Burry, who gained notoriety for shorting the housing market prior to the 2008 financial crisis, wrote on X that “Anthropic is eating Palantir’s lunch,” a statement that caused Palantir’s stock to drop more than 13% over the course of five trading sessions.

The sentiment persisted in the market even after Burry’s posts were later removed. Since fall 2025, Burry has maintained put options on Palantir in spite of President Trump’s direct praise of the company in a Truth Social post. This is the first time in American history that a sitting president has publicly endorsed a particular stock by mentioning its ticker symbol. Before disappearing, the presidential bump lasted for about one trading day. Palantir ended the day lower.

Burry makes a very straightforward case. Compared to Palantir’s more complicated, government-focused platforms, he thinks Anthropic’s product—Claude and the larger ecosystem of API tools and enterprise deployments—is a more affordable and user-friendly option for businesses. In contrast to the years it took Palantir to reach $5 billion in revenue, he also highlighted Anthropic’s trajectory, which went from about $9 billion in ARR to $30 billion in a comparatively short period of time.

Although there are some flaws in the comparison—Palantir’s government contracts have a different strategic weight than enterprise SaaS subscriptions, and the two businesses aren’t exactly in the same market—it is difficult to dispute the fundamental finding regarding Anthropic’s growth velocity. The founder of Altimeter Capital, Brad Gerstner, who placed early bets on Meta and Uber when they were both privately held, recently stated that he wouldn’t be surprised if Anthropic left 2026 with $80 to $100 billion in revenue. He called the last ninety days “the largest revenue explosion in the history of technology.”

The question of how to gain exposure to a business expanding at that rate naturally arises for the majority of readers. The solution is intricate. Secondary market transactions in private companies are illiquid, frequently require accredited investor status, involve substantial minimum purchases, and carry risks not present in public market investing. However, anthropic stock trades on secondary markets; platforms such as Hiive show estimated share prices around $849 per share as of mid-April 2026. The difference between what a buyer will pay and what a seller wants can be quite large. There might be limitations on the shares. If the IPO is postponed, there is no assurance of liquidity. Sophisticated investors are still able to participate despite all of this, but the Anthropic opportunity is not as accessible as purchasing $100 worth of Nvidia stock.

There are detours. AMZN shares are a partial proxy because Amazon has a substantial stake in Anthropic after making a multibillion-dollar investment commitment, even though Anthropic’s performance only accounts for a small portion of Amazon’s total value. Through Alphabet, Google has also made an investment, resulting in a comparable but even more diluted exposure. Through its Innovation Fund, Fundrise has made Anthropic exposure available to retail investors who are prepared to put up with illiquidity. Investors using these strategies should be aware that they are purchasing exposure to a portion of a slice, as each is a workaround rather than a clear investment thesis.

All of this is clouded by the IPO question. According to reports, Anthropic is preparing for an IPO, but no precise date has been disclosed. Timing may be influenced by the volatility of the AI industry (the launch of Claude Mythos reportedly caused a selloff in cybersecurity stocks as investors recalculated competitive dynamics) as well as the general market uncertainty brought on by the Iran conflict and tariff instability. Investors usually put pressure on companies in Anthropic’s growth stage to supply liquidity, and secondary market activity indicates that this pressure is genuine. However, Dario and Daniela Amodei have consistently expressed a desire to build on their own terms, so it’s possible that the IPO will occur later than many in the market anticipate.

Observing Anthropic’s trajectory from the outside gives the impression that the company is in a truly unique position: it is expanding more quickly than nearly any software company in history, surrounded by highly resourced competitors, and doing all of this while remaining privately held, making it largely inaccessible to the retail investors who are most interested in it. Regardless of whether that changes in 2026, 2027, or later, the underlying business is developing something that the market obviously wants at a rate that the market is clearly observing. For the majority of investors, the question is not whether Anthropic is important. It’s when they’ll have the opportunity to own a portion of it under conditions they can genuinely agree to.